Labyrinth
by Mikkeneko
Summary: A strange metaphysical disturbance has taken over an isolated rural town, and it's up to the Avengers to find out what's happening and stop it before it engulfs the rest of the country. And get out alive - if they can. Horror, adventure, rated M for violence and disturbing imagery. Some Bruce/Tony but not the focus of the fic.
1. prologue

**Title**: Labyrinth

**Pairing: **Some Bruce/Tony, but it's really not a pairing-centric fic.

**Warnings**: Too many to list in detail; blood, injury, body horror, and _pay attention_ to the chapter headings.

**Author's note**:

This fic is _The Avengers_ crossed over with a certain series of video games. I'm not going to specify which one. Fans of said game will probably recognize it pretty quickly; for non-fans of the game, I'm hoping that the story will be enjoyable as a horror/adventure story without requiring familiarity with the game. No prior knowledge should be necessary - you'll learn the rules of the world as the Avengers do.

* * *

><p>On the day the signal came Bruce made lunch and carried two plates into the lab, just like he had many times before. He made butter chicken in tomato gravy because it was relatively simple and easy to make, and because he'd spent enough time in India to learn to cook the local cuisine. He'd had to learn that skill many times over in different countries, really, but classic Indian food was the one he liked the best (and was best at.)<p>

It was also a dish he'd successfully gotten Tony to eat before, thus short-circuiting another argument about getting Tony to try unfamiliar dishes. Honestly, for a genius billionaire playboy philanthropist, Iron Man could be such a child at times.

The thought tugged the corner of his mouth upwards in a smile as he carried the plates through the corridors, doors helpfully opening and shutting for him without needing his hands. Tony was in his suit workshop, as he had been all morning, head-down in computer terminals while the inner workings of the suit fanned out in a wide array on the tables around him. He didn't look up when the doors hissed open and Bruce stepped in, either because he was too engrossed in his work to hear him or because he didn't register Bruce's presence as a threat or unusual enough to need attention. Or both.

Bruce found a clear spot at the edge of the table and carefully set the dishes down before peeking in on Tony's work. "Trying to make the self-repair system work again?" he asked after a few moments of interpreting the results.

"Huh?" Tony raised his head, pushing a magnifying goggles up over his hair. His dark hair was already mussed and stuck together with either sweat or oil, probably the latter as he didn't look like he was wrestling anything large enough to break out a sweat. "Oh, yeah. For those marathon training sessions, y'know?"

Bruce hummed in agreement. He definitely understood and shared Tony's interest in getting a functional self-repair component into the Iron Man suit; the longer a fight wore on, the more the suits tended to accumulate little dings and dents that individually wouldn't incapacitate him, but all together added up to something more dangerous. Iron Man didn't always have the ability to call a time-out on a battle to conduct repairs to his suit, so anything that would help Tony to be more protected was a plus in Bruce's book. "What's the problem? The prototype you put together last week seemed to be running fine."

"Sure, in lab conditions," Tony said, pushing aside his work with a sigh. "The problem is that anything that hits the suit hard enough to seriously damage its functionality is also likely to knock out the self-repair system. Catch-22. Self-repairing systems don't do any good if the first thing they have to repair is themselves."

"Ah." Bruce pulled up a lab stool and took up his own plate, taking a thoughtful bite. "So, you need to make the self-repair system more contained, less centralized."

"I thought of that, but it's the same basic problem, since even if the different parts of the suit are compartmentalized with their own self-repair systems, any part that takes damage is still likely to knock out that area's system."

"You're not thinking small enough," Bruce said, gesturing with his fork. "The repair function needs to be inherent to the very materials of the suit, native in every part of it. Think of a cell, isolated and self-contained, but still containing the tools it needs to repair its own damage. The smaller and more discrete the units are, the harder it will be for macro level damage to take it out of commission."

Tony groaned. "Fuck. You're totally right. And that is such a fucking _biologist_ answer, too. Give me hydraulics and circuitry any day, none of this 'organic systems' bullshit."

Bruce grinned. "Speaking of organic systems," he said, and slid Tony's plate pointedly across the table towards him. "You missed breakfast. Eat."

Tony looked greatly put-upon and longsuffering, but obediently took up the plate and began to eat. "Did you make this?" he asked. " 'Cause I want to say it's good, but I don't want you to think that I only love you for your cooking."

Before Bruce could respond to that, a cheerful "Hoy!" echoed through the room. Bruce knew who it was without turning around - he knew that voice, as much as he knew there was only one person likely to be here with the lungs to shout through Tony's soundproofing. And because he recognized the voice, he did not let his heart rate jump when a loud banging started up on the glass door.

"Ah, hell," Tony muttered, craning his neck towards the door. Sure enough, there was Thor, beaming and waving through the glass; with Steve beside him. The two of them, a double dose of big, blond, and effervescent, looked not unlike a rising sun on the other side of the glass.

Tony let out a sigh. "Guess we should go out and be social; I don't really want those two bulls in this particular china shop."

He made a motion to call up his mid-air control panel, and started the lab shutdown before strolling towards the glass doors. Bruce followed behind him, still smiling.

"Welcome back," Bruce said as the glass door fell shut behind him. He took in their clothing: Thor was wearing civilian gear today, jeans and a jacket over a t-shirt. Steve stood beside him, similarly geared but with a baseball cap and logo stitched onto his jacket. "Where did you go?"

Steve answered. "The Mets were in town this week, so I asked Thor if he wanted to go take in a game, and he said yes."

"Really?" Tony said, following behind Bruce as he firmly locked the lab doors. "You took our resident alien to see America's most boring pastime?"

Bruce sighed. "Tony..." he said warningly.

"Sorry, no offense intended," Tony said, grinning, "I just meant that it's not gonna be much fun if you don't know anything about the game. It's just a bunch of guys standing around with only occasional bursts of sprinting."

"I did explain the rules as we went," Steve defended.

"Nay, I quite enjoyed myself," Thor said with a smile. "I did not need to know the rules of the game in order to take in the fine weather and great expanse of outdoors in the stadium, the spirit and excitement of the crowd who had assembled for this most joyous occasion. Nor did I need to know the rules of the game to admire the sportsmanship of the athletes, the great effort and valor that they poured into their craft, and the impressive physiques of their bodies!"

Tony snickered. "Heh, no wonder given how hopped up those guys are on ster - Ow!" He hunched over, hamming it up, as Bruce jabbed him in the ribs with a sharp elbow.

"That's very poetic, Thor," Bruce said. "I'm glad you had a good time."

Whatever might have been said next was cut off by the sudden, sharp buzzing noise of two custom-built, extra-sturdy Stark communicators. Thor's hand went to his breast pocket as Steve reached for his hip; at the same moment, Bruce heard a tinny melody from his phone that indicated he'd gotten mail.

_"Sir,"_ JARVIS spoke from overhead._ "It seems that the Director has called an alert on the Avengers emergency frequency."_

"Emergency alert, eh?" Tony rubbed his hands together, working off a stray spot of grease. "How many apocalypses?"

_"I believe this would rate as a two point five on your apocalypse scale, sir,"_ JARVIS reported obediently. _"He classes the situation as 'urgent, but not critical.' "_

"Then I'd better change and get down there, I guess," Steve said.

Thor nodded. "Aye, I as well," he said as Steve put action to words, bowing himself out. "Although if the need is not too urgent I do believe I will indulge in a shower first. Over the course of the match, I was ritually anointed with the mead of several overenthusiastic fans in the benches behind."

He looked no less the cheerful for it as he exited, leaving Bruce and Tony alone once more.

Bruce sighed. He had honestly been enjoying the peace and quiet. "Well," he said, "I guess we should head on down to the War Room as well."

All at once, Tony's arms were on either side of him, pinning him up against the glass wall of the lab. "Not so fast, tiger," Tony purred, with a wicked gleam in his eye. "Let Agent cool his heels for a while. Sometimes he needs to be reminded that we don't jump when he says frog."

Bruce couldn't help but smile, warmed with a heat that was one part embarrassment and two parts desire. "Tony, sometimes I wonder if I should worry that you consider defying authority a turn-on," he half-complained.

"I find lots of things a turn-on," Tony said, nuzzling the edge of his lapel where it fell across Bruce's throat. "Like sexy scientists in business casual labcoats in my workshop."

His hand began to wander up under the hem of Bruce's shirt, and Bruce captured it firmly in his own. "No, Tony," he said. "I refuse to show up at an Avengers briefing smelling like I just had sex."

Tony gave him a pleading look. "We could shower afterwards..." he offered.

"That would just make it even more obvious what we've been doing," Bruce said firmly. "We can wait."

"You with your 'work ethic' and 'sense of professionalism,' " Tony grumbled, leaning back and letting Bruce up. "Fine. But if we both die on this mission without ever having sex again, I get to say "I told you so."

* * *

><p>The Avengers weren't part of SHIELD any more; they weren't under Coulson's command like they had been under Fury's (inasmuch as Fury had ever been able to control them in the first place.) SHIELD had fallen, and rebuilt itself into something much smaller, stealthier, lower to the ground. No, he did not command the Avengers; but he had eyes and ears in places they did not, and if a new menace appeared that would come to threaten their world, Coulson would hear about it sooner rather than later. So they had… an understanding. Call it a professional relationship. He didn't try to use the Avengers for his personal empire-building and in return, when he called on them, they took him seriously.<p>

Although he'd been a part of the Avengers Initiative from the beginning, and had given more than anyone else (up to and including his actual life) to make it a reality, Philip Coulson didn't _actually_ enjoy calling up the Avengers for every little problem and situation. They were too flashy, too visible, drawing attention like a beacon wherever they went. Coulson generally preferred to use his own resources where he could teams and agents that obeyed orders and carried out operations without the whole thing being an exercise in herding cats. Besides which, the Avengers tended to leave behind almost as much chaos and destruction as whatever threat they'd been sent to stop.

That's why he waited five days after the first report crossed his desk before he hit the button that sent out the call.

There were several different codes they had agreed on, before the motley cast of heroes had all scattered to go their own ways, to let them know if they were needed once more. Code Red was the most urgent - it indicated a threat was _immediate,_ and the Avengers would drop whatever else they were doing and congregate at the nearest possible meeting point as quickly as possible. The one that Coulson used today was a few steps down from that - Code Yellow, which meant that they should come to the War Room for a full debrief, if not within the hour, then at least by the end of the day.

Stark Tower had, of course, a multitude of assembly and conference rooms, including one up near the conference level that took up the entire floor and was surrounded by a grand glass view of the city. It had a wide obsidian table, state-of-the-art videoconferencing tools, and chairs emblazoned with the symbol of each Avenger on the leather backs.

It was, of course, the target of every wannabe supervillain and espionage agent on the eastern seaboard, so they mostly only used it for debates about whose turn it was to do the cooking. The _real_ strategy room was buried on the 31st floor, in among the janitorial and server closets, with no windows whatsoever and every electronic jamming device known to man going full blast. Only a select few had the codes necessary to call the War Room, and Coulson was one of the few.

Barton and Romanov were actually in the War Room already; Coulson had been careful to keep them in the loop since the trouble began, even before it escalated to the point of requiring the Avengers. Captain America himself showed up not long after Coulson made the call; he was always the most prompt of the entire team, the military having ingrained "if you aren't ten minutes early, you're late" in him at a bone-deep level.

"What's going on, Director Coulson?" Steve wanted to know. "I haven't heard of anything on the news - at least, not anything more than the usual." He shot the other two SHIELD agents a questioning, slightly anxious glance, no doubt wondering what he'd missed.

"As if the news networks ever know anything," Barton snorted. "Constantly caught with their pants down, they are."

Coulson knew from periodic checkups on Steve's progress that his adaptation to the 21st century had been... patchy; quick in some places, slow in others. He instantly took to the idea of televised news, that being merely an extension of the newspapers and news radio he was already familiar with. But he hadn't yet made the corollary discovery that news television was neither thorough nor reliable, dependant as they were on sensationalism and visual interest.

"There's been nothing on the internet, either," Romanov offered quietly, sliding into a seat at the end of the long table. She was already alert and guarded, her personality (and occasionally dubious sense of humor) faded into the background to allow her to concentrate fully on the threat.

"I'll explain everything, but I'd rather only have to tell it once," Coulson promised him. He glanced at the time readout on his screen. "As soon as your teammates arrive, we can get started. I said 'not critical,' not 'stop for a haircut on the way here.' "

Thor arrived next, getting Coulson's hopes up, but he was alone. "Where are Stark and Banner?" he asked, an edge creeping into his voice. "I know Stark well enough that he practically has his phone wired to his skull, and he and Banner are attached at the hip these days."

Barton snickered something that didn't make it across the microphones, but it was enough to make Steve's ears turn pink. Thor shrugged, looking unconcerned. "They told me to go on ahead, as I would not be traveling by the same means," he said.

Coulson dialed Stark's number again, and got shunted to voicemail. Just before he would have gotten annoyed enough to send an extraction team into Stark Tower after him, the man arrived. Banner trailed along behind him, looking small and rumpled as he always did, out of place amongst all the hard-edged professionalism of the rest of the team. A dangerous illusion, that harmlessness; Coulson knew all too well that he was the most dangerous one on the team. Their trump card.

"Now that we're all here," Coulson said dryly, "we can begin.

"This past Friday, a small town in Pennsylvania dropped off the grid." Coulson sent the first of the map files across the connection, from his console to their display. He brought up a map of the US and began zooming in, highways and rivers and mountains going by in a rush as he focused in on a broad, empty patch of land.

Stark began laughing. "Oh, Phil, don't tell me that you're still using _Apple Maps,_" he exclaimed. "Seriously, I'd think you'd have learned the first time one of your agents got sent to an empty patch of the Caribbean when they were trying to get to Atlantic City."

Coulson gave him a look of severe disapproval. "This is proprietary SHIELD technology, Stark," he said.

"The designer just happens to be a bit of a Steve Jobs fanboy," Natasha murmured to the inventor. Stark laughed again, before his expression sobered.

"Seriously though, Agent, I'd be happy to write a new program for you that works _much_ better," he offered.

"And is all full of your own little backdoors, I'm sure," Coulson said oppressively; Stark just shrugged, not denying the accusation. Banner nodded wryly and Barton snorted, while Thor and Steve just looked confused.

"Back to the problem at hand," Steve said, calling his team into line with a reproving glance at Stark. "What do you mean, dropped off the grid? You mean they're not answering phone calls, or what?"

"I mean as far as the rest of the world is concerned, Middleton, Pennsylvania has ceased to exist," Coulson replied. "Anyone trying to contact them just gets a no-signal return. Telephone, digital, power - all suddenly cut off. We called a complete quarantine of the place on Sunday night, but it's small and out-of-the-way enough that nobody's really noticed yet."

He finished centering the map view on the town in question, then expanded it to maximum size and switched to satellite view. He knew what they would see; green filled the screen, the lush rolling vegetation of the Pennsylvania countryside largely uninterrupted by artifice. The nearest town was miles away, and even the nearest highways were barely visible on the horizon. The town itself sat in an empty patch of terrain, a modest cluster of roads and buildings perched on the lip of a wide grey scar on the land.

"What's that on the edge?" Barton wanted to know.

"Coal mine," Coulson explained briefly. "Middleton started out as a coaling town, and never really grew past it when coal went out of fashion. There's not much to recommend it besides the coal mine and the refinery that went with it. The population's not more than a few hundred people nowadays."

Natasha's sharp eyes glinted as she leaned forward on the table, raising one hand to call attention to the corner of the map. "This satellite image is from a week ago," she said. "Why isn't there a more current one?"

"Because at the moment, all the satellites can get a picture of is a solid mass of smoke," Coulson replied, switching the view to current to demonstrate. "Our best guess is that something started a fire in the mine, and it's been burning for days - and it could go on burning for years, depending on how deep the coal seams go."

"But a coal fire by itself wouldn't cut off all communications, would it?" Banner exclaimed. "I mean, even if all the residents evacuated, we'd still be getting answering pings from the relay towers on the ground."

"Correct." Coulson smiled grimly. "And for your information, the residents _haven't_ evacuated - not as far as we've been able to tell. No one's come out of there since then, and no one who's gone in has responded."

A slightly daunted silence fell, and Coulson went on with his debriefing. He brought up another filter to lay over the map, a faint violet tinge that formed a loose circle around the town. "Now all that is strange enough, but not necessarily a cause for national concern," he went on. "What _is_ more worrying is the fact that ever since we started turning our eyes and ears on this town, we've been getting some mighty strange readings off it. There some kind of energy there - something acting as an interference field that keeps us from seeing what's going on down there. I'd say they're like nothing we've ever seen before on Earth, but unfortunately, that's not quite true. We _have_ seen them before - mostly in the handful of cases that Dr. Stephen Strange has been able to identify for us as someone working Old Earth magic."

He carefully watched the faces of his team, gauging their reactions. Thor sat up straight, looking interested for the first time in this discussion of power lines and telephones and signals; Stark and Banner both took on a faintly pinched, harassed look as though the very existence of magic was an affront to their worldview. The rest of them looked faintly worried, but not yet worried enough.

"This was the best mapping of the interference field we were able to get Monday night," Coulson continued. He paged forward by a day; the violet circle looked largely unchanged. "By Tuesday afternoon, it had grown by approximately ten feet in all directions. By Tuesday night, twenty feet." He flipped forward several more images, each one showing the purple haze spreading alarmingly fast towards the corners of the map. "Our best estimates show that ever since then, the rate of growth has approximately doubled every twenty-four hours. The last reading we were able to get, before our nearest instruments were knocked out, showed that it was expanding at a rate of about two miles per hour."

Barton cursed softly. Two miles an hour wasn't fast - about as fast as a man could walk, if he wasn't in a hurry - but if it kept on accelerating at a geometric rate...

"Normally we would expect the expansion of such a field to slow down the larger it became, as it would require more and more energy to maintain itself," Coulson said. "But the opposite seems to be the case here. Gentlemen and lady, if this interference is not stopped, then we can expect to see half of the Northeastern United States under its influence in a week."

"What can we do to stop it?" Steve said, all business now. "I mean, none of us are experts at magic, except maybe Thor..."

Thor was already shaking his head. "Nay, that has never been my expertise," he said. "For all that it is common to our people, I never made an especial study of it. That was always left to -" He cut off abruptly, his blue eyes darkened. Barton scowled and looked away, and everybody else pretended that they hadn't just almost raised the specter of Thor's crazy little megalomanic brother in the hearing of the man who'd almost died by his hand.

"I don't know yet what you can do," Coulson said, answering Steve's question. It almost hurt to admit that, to reveal their bone-deep ignorance on the matter. "But we aren't getting any closer to figuring it out from the outside. We need someone to go in there, get to the heart of it and put a stop to it before it spreads; and since we don't know what's down there, I want to send the highest-firepower response team I have. The six of you took on an alien invasion single-handed; I'm pretty confident that you're more than a match for whatever... or _whoever..._ is causing this, too."

He paused, surveying the room through the camera. "Any questions?" he asked.

"Lots," Banner said with a wry smile, "but I'm pretty sure you just said you don't have answers to them, if we really can't get any readings from the outside. So I guess we'll just have to answer our questions ourselves."

"Fortunately, we're pretty good at that," Stark replied confidently.

"That's why I chose you," Coulson said, and rapped sharply on the table. "You are the Avengers; you are the best we've got to offer. Get in there, find out what's causing this, rescue whatever civilians you can, and put a stop to it."

"Right," Rogers said, and rose from the table with his jaw squared. "Avengers, assemble!"

Coulson cut the connection.

* * *

><p>~tbc..<p> 


	2. fear of weakness (asthenophobia)

**asthenophobia  
><strong>(fear of weakness)

* * *

><p>Tony didn't usually ride in the quinjet, unless the flight was going to be a long haul. He could go as fast (or faster) than the jet in his suit, and he could fly ahead and take out any kind of anti-air defenses that might lie in wait. It gave them a hell of a lot more tactical flexibility to have two birds in the sky instead of one.<p>

But on this trip, Steve had insisted that he ride along in the jet and Tony had acquiesced, mostly because he couldn't see where the hell they were going. Coulson hadn't been kidding about the smoke; it billowed out of the mouth of the coal mine in big, nasty brown clouds that covered the entire town from above. That would have been enough of a hassle by itself, but there was also a small lake on the edge of the town that must have leaked through some underground channels into the coal fire. Hidden outlets all over the hillside were billowing out a thick, wet grey steam that blanketed the town and rendered it nearly invisible from the ground level as well.

Target acquisition was gonna be a _bitch_.

"We're going to be over the town in ten minutes," Natasha called back from the cockpit, taking on her usual role as the pilot. Barton sat in the copilot's chair beside her, squinting through the smoke and fog ahead. "Do we know where we're going yet?"

"As far as I can triangulate it, the center of the signal seems to be here," Bruce said, his quiet voice barely carrying over the noise of the jet. He touched a spot on the map on the northwest edge of town, between the border of the town buildings and the coal mine itself. "Somewhere underground, judging by the resonance."

Steve held on to the wall through the buffeting turbulence as he looked out the cockpit window, his forehead pinching in that adorably responsible way he got. "We're not going to be able to go in through the top of the mine," he decided. "Not with the way that fire is going. We'd be roasted if we even tried to fly over it. We'll have to land somewhere in the town itself, and find another way down."

"Didn't Coulson say there was a refinery?" Tony chipped in, glancing over the graph-paper map of the town; his gaze landed on one large square block near where Bruce had indicated. "Because this was a coal town, right? They build it right on top of the mine. If it's anything like the factories I've worked with before, there's got to be some route down to the mine. They'd want to shuttle coal between the mine and the refinery the most efficient way possible."

"You think there will be tunnels?" Barton called back, sounding dubious.

"Worth a shot," Tony said cheerfully. "If there aren't any there, then Thor and I can probably make some." Thor smiled at him in sunny agreement.

"I think," Steve started to say, but the rest of his words were cut off as the Quinjet suddenly lurched to the side, then dropped like a stone.

Natasha swore in Russian as she wrestled with the controls, but the console had gone dead when she was halfway through a banked turn. With great effort she managed to get them straightened out into something like a glide, but the bank of fog was rushing up to greet them.

"Need a runway, guys!" she shouted towards the back, and Tony lunged forward, calibrating his suit's internal GPS with what he had been able to read of the map.

"Here - there should be an open field you can land on," Tony said, jabbing his finger out the window towards the southwest. The 'open field' was in fact a cemetery, but this was not the time to get picky about the landing spots offered. "Turn left by 47 degrees and go another half-mile, then put us down."

"I need some kind of guide," Natasha said through clenched teeth, every muscle locked and vibrating with concentration. "The instruments are dead and all I can see out there is fog."

"I'll lay down a path of flares," Tony promised, and stepped towards the hatch. The Iron Man suit was self-contained, and thankfully seemed to be immune to whatever electricity-killing pulse had killed the Jet.

"Guys? We have another problem," Barton spoke up then, his voice tight and deliberately calm. "The landing gear won't deploy."

Steve sprang into action, pulling himself across the juddering cabin to the locker where the parachutes were stored. "Dr. Banner, Hawkeye, put these on," he instructed, waiting until the parachutes had left his hands before shimmying into his own. "Bruce, have you used one of these before?"

"I haven't, but that's not what I'm really worried about," Bruce said tightly. "There's a good chance that if I step out of that hatch, it'll be the Other Guy who hits the ground."

"Don't know how much good these will do when we can't even see the damn ground," Barton said grimly. "Pull the cord too early, we could get blown to Albuquerque. Pull too late, and we'll be splattered."

"Whoa, guys, aren't you forgetting something?" Tony interrupted before this scenario could devolve into the Other Guy joining them _before_ they left the jet. "Two of us can _fly._ Set the Jet to glide, then Thor and I can each carry two -"

"There is no need for that," Thor declared, standing up from his jump seat. (He'd forgotten to remove the seatbelt first, and the sad strap of cloth ripped soundlessly away from the seat and fluttered to the floor.) "I will go outside this vessel, and guide it to a safe landing without need of this 'landing gear.' "

There was a brief silence in the cabin. "Oh," Steve said awkwardly. It was easy to forget, sometimes, just _how_ powerful Thor was. "That'd... yeah, that'd work."

"Do it!" Natasha broke in, still riding the unresponsive controls. "But do it fast."

The hatch roared open and the two Avengers dropped out in streaks of red and gold; the black belly of the Quinjet faded quickly into the damp fog behind them. Thor turned back towards the jet, twirling his hammer in his hand as he calculated angles and weights. Iron Man peeled off from him and shot ahead.

He still couldn't see a damn thing in this fog. Tony turned on the night-vision settings of his HUD; it still wasn't perfect, but it allowed him a slightly-clearer vision of the landscape below. With the help of his suit's targeting protocols, but mostly his own inherent kinesthetic sense, Tony quickly mapped out a suitably clear runway on the graveyard below. It would be better to avoid the churchyard perched at the edge of the lot, with stark black edges promising to catch and tear out the metal guts of any unlucky bird that flew near it; but to the left of that was a nice, broad stretch of turf with only a few stunted trees breaking up the landscape.

Tony flew over the hillside, dropping brilliant magnesium flares to mark the longest, flattest path for the Quinjet to land. The slope angled slightly upwards, but that was probably for the best, bleeding off the incoming vessel's momentum before it ran out of runway. Then the path was marked, the way was set, and Tony had done all he could. He shot back up and to the side out of the Quinjet's path and hovered, watching the huge dark bulk of the vehicle drift forward through the fog.

It seemed like the plane was going to dig itself right into the hillside. Tony, having seen the footage of more wrecks than he cared to count, could already imagine the way the jet would break apart, the way the wings would snap off and the barrel would crumple up like a Slinky. Those in the cabin would be all right - probably, modern jets were designed for survivability of the cabin in all situations - but anyone in the cockpit would be crushed in what was effectively a trash compactor. Tony started forward, already knowing that there was nothing he could do -

But just before the point of impact, a bright flash of red appeared beneath the jet. Thor appeared, his hammer shining, and angled himself between the belly of the jet and the ground. There was a horrific _crunching_ noise as he made contact, and the momentum of the jet opened up a long dark scar in the ground as Thor was driven across it - but then, at the last possible moment, the nose of the jet tilted upwards. Thor (still miraculously un-jellyfied) continued to strain to push the jet to the right angle, easing its contact with the ground as the last of its gliding momentum bled away.

Tony jetted in before the plane had quite stopped moving, and found Thor crawling out from the ditch that the jet nose had settled in. He looked dirty, scratched up and slightly rugburned, but whole and cheerful. "Nice work, big guy," Tony said, covering up his shaky relief with flippancy.

"Aye, it was no matter," Thor exclaimed.

The rest of the Avengers emerged slowly, cautiously taking in the misty surroundings as they climbed out of the slightly-warped hatchway. "What happened?" Steve wanted to know as the dust settled. "Did we lose an engine somehow?"

"Not just the engines," Natasha told him in a clipped tone, as she freed herself from the pilot's harness. "Every electrical system in the plane went out at once. I couldn't get anything restarted. Comm's down, too."

"We crossed over into the field of interference," Bruce said. Everyone looked at him in surprise, and he wriggled uncomfortably. "We should have expected something like this. We knew that everything inside the city had gone dead."

"Nuh uh," Tony said. "Not everything. My suit's still running, and all of our headsets as well." All of their communicators were his own tech, specially made for their needs, and relayed through the Iron Man suit in lieu of any outside satellites or towers. He couldn't ping JARVIS though, which made him uneasy. The suit didn't have enough processing power to host a full version of his AI by itself, but it should have had a dedicated satellite feed strong enough to punch through any interference.

"I don't know why those aren't affected," Bruce admitted. "Maybe there's something special about the way Starktech runs its wiring. At any rate, let's not look a gift horse in the mouth."

Natasha climbed over the back of the tilted cockpit, joining the rest of them in the cabin. "We probably should have set down further outside the city limits, and hiked in."

"But it was too early," Clint objected. "The field's border shouldn't have been for another five miles."

"Unless it's grown again," Bruce said grimly.

"All right," Steve said, taking over the conversation easily. "What's done is done; we won't be getting this bird in the air again. Let's get on with the mission; if we can take down what's generating the field from the inside, we can radio for backup from SHIELD."

The remaining five Avengers climbed out of the jet and stared with some dismay at the vista before them. It could not have looked any less like the bucolic country town they'd seen in the recorded satellite imagines - sunny, green, and inviting.

They were at the top of a gentle hill that sloped away northward towards the town, sparsely pepped with withered brown grass. The gray steam settled over the town like a blanket; only the barest outlines of the nearby buildings were visible, everything beyond that lost to blankness except where the sharp angle of rooftops or clawed skeletons of metal framework thrust above the skyline.

On the far side of the town, the deep grey scar on the earth that was the coal mine was invisible from this angle. But the coal-fed fire that raged in the mine still cast up belching clouds of smoke; it was black, and underlit by angry orange that billowed upwards in a steady column. An eerie red haze spread steadily across the sky over the town like a dome, cutting them off from the rest of the world.

"Yech," Stark said for all of them, then sighed. "What a mess. Well, let's go clean it up."

He snapped the faceplate of his visor down, and the team started down the hill towards the town.

* * *

><p>"Thor, do you think you can do anything about this fog?" Steve asked as they hiked down the hill. "At least so that we can get a glimpse of what's waiting down there for us."<p>

"I shall try," Thor said, and he unclasped his hammer from his hip and raised it to the sky. A bolt of white light lanced from the clouds to his hammer - or maybe from the hammer to the sky, it was hard to tell in such a split-second - and the sky overhead began to roil.

The next moment, a cold sharp wind hit them, howling down the hillside into the town. When it hit, the fog bank burst into a chaos of eddies - grey fog churned like a boiling pot, pouring out of one street before spilling back into another - but the air itself did not clear.

"This fog resists me," Thor reported. "I know not what the source of its strength is, but it is not part of the normal air and sky, and it will not move for Mjolnir. I shall try rain, instead, to settle the fog."

That was an idea that Tony, at least, was _not_ so fond of - but before anyone could object the wind shifted, veering sharply to the north and bringing a distinct smell of mildew and decay. The clouds overhead darkened before bursting into rain, soaking them all to the skin within minutes.

"C'mon, Thor, really?" Barton groaned. Thor laughed and clapped him on the back.

"A little wet will do you no harm," he boomed. "Why, are you made of sugar, that will melt in the rain? Surely you have done battle in all sorts of weather before."

"I have," Barton grumbled, "but that doesn't mean I have to like it."

"Now we're getting somewhere," Steve said, as below them in the streets the mists began to thin. They could faintly see the outlines of the buildings, familiar in shape if not in detail. One-story and two-story houses; gas stations; strip malls; and the occasional blocky bulk of a parking garage or office building.

And in the streets between them, still mostly masked in the fog, moved dim figures shaped vaguely like humans, but as large and bulky as cars. Just a few at first, but then, as the fog continued to clear, more... and more; _dozens_ of them.

"Is there any chance we can overfly them?" Steve asked, surveying the gauntlet before them with some dismay.

Barton shook his head. "Not a good idea, Cap," he said. "Without the Quinjet, we'd be relying on Thor and Tony to carry us - awkward and dangerous, and we'd be sitting ducks if anything down there tried to take a potshot at us."

"Besides, it is unwise to leave such a force of foes behind us," Thor added, unslinging Mjolnir and stretching his arms. "I am sure these creatures will be no great impediment to us. They are many and strong, but slow, and we can overcome them!"

"Pretty sure Thoreal here is right," Tony chipped in, surveying the field. "Normally I'm all for taking shortcuts, but I think this time the best thing is just to dive right in and get smashing. Speaking of which, Bruce - do you think it's about time to suit up?"

Bruce looked up at them with an absent, funny sort of smile - the same one that always made him look like his mind was a hundred miles away. "Sorry, if you think you can go on without me for a bit, I'd rather not just yet," he said softly. "I'm still working to analyze these energy readings, and I think - I think I can knock together something that might help us."

Steve nodded. "If that's where you think you're at your best, then we'll manage without the Other Guy for a while," he said confidently. "OK, Avengers - let's go!"

Tony flew ahead, making a low buzzing pass (although not _too_ low) over the nearest cross-street with all his active sensors pushed to max to get a sense of what their opponents were like. And had to suck in his breath when the image formed up in perfect hi-def 3D in his HUD, because these critters had _no brains._

Not just in the sense that their skulls were too tiny for their gargantuan size. Their skull cases were collapsed, not only flat but actually indented, hair spilling like dark weeds over the ridge of bone to straggle down each side. The exaggerated flatness of the skullcaps made the frontal ridge of bone protrude heavily over the eyes, which bulged outwards from the head like a frog's, huge and milky and blind.

The rest of the creature didn't get any more attractive from there; the collapsed braincase led straight down to a thick short neck set on massive, ridiculously exaggerated shoulders. The shoulders were nearly three times the width of the hips, scrawny legs bowed with the effort of supporting the tree-trunk arms that almost - but not quite - brushed the ground. The one he had visual lock on at that moment clutched what appeared to be a torn-off hunk of rebar in one fist. As it turned in a tight alleyway the bar of metal jammed against the brick wall, dug in point-first, and then ripped a long slash in the mortar without any apparent effort on the part of its wielder.

"These things have weapons... sort of," Tony reported back to his teammates, feeling his stomach twitch in uncomfortable nausea the longer he studies them. "And they're strong as hell. Don't get in the way of their swing."

_"We'll keep that in mind,"_ Steve responded in a businesslike tone. _"Any weaknesses that you can tell?"_

"Well, I've found that most targets respond well to blowing up, but I'll have to conduct a few trial runs to see," Tony replied.

_"That's _always _your plan," _Natasha muttered.

_"I am all in favor of the blowing things up plan,"_ Barton chipped in over the radio.

Tony braked to a stop mid-air and extended his arm, activating the missile protocols embedded in each shoulder. He heard and saw the familiar beeping and flashing as the targeting programs locked on, and then let loose. The missiles left little puffs of steam as they streaked away from him, sending him rocking back slightly in the air.

The missiles hit their target and burst, a quick staccato round of fire that packed a hell of a punch despite their small size. A chorus of howls rose up in response, his targets thrashing around and flailing fruitlessly at the air with their makeshift weapons as they tried to lash out at whatever had bit them. Tony could see he'd made a dent, leaving large scorchmarks in their tough grey hide and sending two of them limping and dragging deadened, useless limbs.

The nearest one to him swung ponderously around, its blind fishlike eyes questing through the empty fog, and then with a sudden and frightening burst of speed it charged directly forward and crashed with an earth-shaking impact against the nearest wall. Like a robot with a broken AI it stayed there, beating its concave head mindlessly against the structure and lashing out with its makeshift club, reducing the brick wall ahead of it to rubble. Tony actually had to jet quickly up into the sky several meters to avoid the flying debris, chunks of masonry tossed up effortlessly into the air even to his level.

"They're tough, but not invincible," Tony replied, just a little bit out of breath from the quick maneuvering he had to do. "Word of warning, don't get in front of one of them if it takes it in its head to charge. And if you get one down, make sure it stays down - they'll get back up after a hell of a lot of punishment."

_"Copy that,"_ Steve said seriously. _"All right. Avengers, engage the enemy."_

They moved in, their battle formation smooth as a well-oiled machine. Thor led the charge - literally, hoisting Mjolnir over his head as he barreled into the fray with an exuberant war-cry. Lightning crackled off Mjolnir's head, illuminating in flashes the rictus grin of savage satisfaction as Thor flung himself into the melee with two of the lumbering creatures at once.

Normally the Hulk would be out there too, bellowing with battle-rage and seizing one enemy in each hand to make use of the sure tactic of beating them with their own kind. But this time Bruce was hanging back, still intent on his work as he moved slowly along in their wake and yeah, Tony didn't much like it but he agreed that they didn't really need the Other Guy just yet. These guys weren't so tough that Thor alone wasn't more than a match for them. With his glittering armor, brilliant red cape and bright blond hair Thor made quite the spectacle, attracting the attention of every enemy within eyesight. They converged on his position, leaving space for the rest of the team to slide in behind.

Hawkeye was a charcoal-colored blur, limbs moving swiftly as he found a climbable wall face that led up to the top of a shop awning. From there he perched and strafed the battlefield with arrows, easily marking targets and picking them off. Ordinary arrowheads barely seemed to slow these monsters down, sticking out from their roid-rage muscles like quills on a porcupine. But he wouldn't be SHIELD's finest marksman if ordinary arrows were all he had up his sleeve, and his explosive-tipped arrows and poison-gas arrows sent the enemies staggering back, shaking their heads and pawing at their faces.

Natasha slipped through the shadows, and even with his superior vantage point Tony could hardly track her movements; she just _appeared_ all at once out of the shadows, leaping agilely on the back of one of the creatures flailing wildly at Thor. She was choosing to conserve her ammunition, using one of her long knives instead. She brought it around in a wide glittering arc before driving it home, sending her unfortunate mount down in a thrashing, bellowing collapse.

Moving among all of them was Captain America, bright and bold in his white-and-blue outfit and yeah, there was no denying that he was in charge of this battle. Tony might have been their eyes in the sky but Steve was their heart, moving confidently and surely from one melee to the next, keeping a close and careful eye on every one of his teammates. When danger moved on any of them he would fling his shield to intercept, wielding an instrument of defense as surely as any weapon. He called out orders over the comm for them to advance, hold formation, shift and fall back as necessary, and under his direction they moved like a scythe through the press of enemies.

The - monsters; Tony tried to be careful of the word, for Bruce's sake, but there really wasn't much else he could call them. They sure as hell weren't human but they weren't like any animals he'd ever seen, either. Just the sight of them made his stomach clench and roll, made his nerves recoil with the sheer _wrongness_ of their existence. It was the heads that really bothered him, he decided; no living being should have a skull like that. For Tony, whose brain was without question his favorite part of his body (okay, maybe _second favorite,)_ it almost hurt just to look at them.

The _monsters_ weren't really posing all that much of a threat; they were strong but they had no tactics, no coordination at all. They lumbered in slow, elephantine paths until something caught their attention, at which point they galloped forwards swinging their crude weapons in blatantly telegraphed arcs. So long as the Avengers were careful not to get caught directly in front of one when it charged - even Thor might not stand up well against their mindless, pulverizing fury - they weren't too much of a threat.

Tony stayed in the air, providing covering fire when Steve called for it and taking leisurely potshots at the monsters when he didn't. It was just a mindless grind at this point, the determination to get in there and stick with the job until it was done. "What kind of a sick mind do you have to have to come up with things like this, anyway?" Tony wondered idly.

_"Well, you're our resident mad scientist, why don't you tell us?"_ Natasha quipped. Somehow, even though she had to move her footing more than any of them except perhaps Thor, she hardly even sounded out of breath.

"Mad scientist? Please," Tony scoffed. "Academia has never been my style. I'm more an 'eccentric engineer' if anything. Brucey-baby's the scientist here."

_"That may be, but I have no idea how these things came about,"_ Bruce responded absently.

"What, and here I thought you were a master of every discipline. You broke my heart with lies, Bruce," Tony crooned, sending out a spiral of tiny missiles that spat death. "He blinded me with science, sexy, sexy science -"

_"Oh God, Cap, make them stop flirting over the combat channel,"_ Clint moaned. _"I don't know how much of this I can take."_

_"Keep your focus, guys,"_ Steve ordered in his best Mom Voice. _"This isn't the time or place for flirting."_

_"I'm not flirting,"_ Bruce half-apologized, half-complained. _"I can't help it if Tony is."_

"Hey, may I remind you that I was the one who furnished the comms you're chatting over?" Tony sniped. "I'll flirt with who I please."

_" - but anyway, I'm no biologist, but frankly speaking I don't understand how these things are even alive."_

_"Magic?"_ Thor suggested tersely. The melee around him was heating up, and Thor tended to get less chatty as a response (unlike Tony, who only got more chatty the longer the fight drew out.) While Thor was a gregarious sort, and loved to gab on at length about his past adventures while gearing up for or winding down from a mission, once he got into the heat of battle he didn't like to talk much. It had been an ongoing struggle just to get him to verbally acknowledge Steve's orders over the comm, but he was trying.

_"Fuckin' magic!" _Clint groaned, raising his bow again. His shot winged expertly in the slot between two of the hulk-monsters (Tony really needed to find a better word for them; it was uncomfortable drawing that comparison even in his head.) The wicked arrowhead sliced neatly past one bulging eye, blinding it on that side, and as it howled and stumbled back the arrow continued blithely on the bury itself in the throat of another. The monster gurgled, clutching at its throat, and the arrow gave off bright white sparks as dark blood gushed over it. One of Clint's magnesium arrows, then - and sure enough it exploded, a blast of fire that engulfed the creature's head. Tony sped onwards, trusting Clint to pick off any who got too close to his position.

_"They remind me somewhat -"_ Thor said, breaking his sentence with a grunt as he turned, swinging._ "- of the trolls of Nidvallir."_

"No trolls on Earthgard, Thor, except for the kind that frequent Youtube forums," Tony said. One of the creatures lumbered towards his position, swinging a broken-off lamppost, and Tony dodged it deftly. "But these guys are more like a gorilla crossed with an elephant. If it was an anencephalic elephant. Hey, maybe we should call them anencelephants. It kind of rolls off the tongue, don't you think?"

He fired off a quick burst of three rounds at a nearby anencelephant (see, that _was_ descriptive; nice and meaty,) punching a cluster of holes in its guts. "D'you think we can trademark it, swindle this dude out of royalties?"

_"What is your obsession with royalties, Tony?"_ Clint complained.

"Someone has to manage the intellectual properties on the Avengers, to keep you guys in punching bags and pop-tarts," Tony defended himself. "I hope you weren't relying on SHIELD to do it. Fury'd rather bury the whole Initiative under a black ops tarpaulin before he'd sell a single t-shirt -"

_"Tony, cut the comm chatter," _Steve ordered, buzzkill that he was. _"Try to focus, we have a job to do here."_

"Hey, I am doing my job," Tony objected. "My constant witty banter helps keep up team morale. You don't appreciate all the effort I put in, Cap."

There was a soft snort over the channel - probably Natasha, judging from the harmonics. Still, Tony took the hint and shut up - at least for the time being.

He was just gearing up to make another run when his sensors flashed an urgent warning at him: CIVILIAN. He did a double-take, zooming in his helmet cameras on the quadrant of the landscape that had flagged his attention. It was more than a little startling to see that warning flash up in the middle of such a chaotic battlefield: normally his friend-foe programs took a few more moments to be able to sort out a friendly target from a hostile one, unless...

"Guys, I've got a kid up here," he said into his comm, swerving abruptly away from his strafing path towards the stretch of rooftop where the icon flashed. Immediately

_"You've got a _what?"That from Banner, distressed and incredulous.

_"What's he doing in the middle of the hot zone?"_ That was Clint, sounding slightly peeved - no doubt at the complication of his formerly clean field of enemies.

_"You've found a survivor? Is he... okay?" _And finally from Steve, wavering for a moment from his usual all-business tone.

"I don't know yet," he answered all three questions at once. "Cover my gap for a few minutes. I'm going to see if he's all right, and in any condition to be moved."

He slowed down dramatically as he approached the rooftop - a flat patch of asphalt on a two-story residential, peaked tile roofs on three sides of him shielding him from view. A spindly tree beside the rooftop answered one question as to how he could have crawled up here, or the small windowed gable beside him. Either way, Tony didn't want to frighten the kid any more than he could help, so he came to a relatively gentle landing before he cut his jets and strode forward, popping his helmet open.

"Hey there, kiddo," he said, voice slightly gruff. Despite how long he'd been at the superhero business, he still wasn't at his best with kids. "Do you know who I am?"

The kid - he looked to be about eight or nine years old, with dark brown hair and big ears - looked up at him, his face pinched with a frown. "No," he said.

That gave Tony pause. There weren't many kids in the USA - or, for that matter, any country with television - who didn't recognize Iron Man, at least from the merchandising. Maybe this town had been Amish or something. They lived in rural Pennsylvania, right? "Well, I'm Tony Stark," he said after a beat, and crouched awkwardly down next to the boy. "Hey, kid, this is a pretty dangerous place right now. How about I get you out of here, and take you somewhere safe?"

_"Iron Man, we can't spare you," _Steve warned him.

"I'm not going to leave a kid here by himself," Tony snapped back into the comm. "I can fly, remember? I'll take him out to the Quinjet, leave him in there. It's plenty visible from the air, he'll be fine until a rescue team comes. How about that, huh?" he switched his focus back to the child. "Have you ever seen a jet up close before? It's really cool. There's snacks in the minifridge and everything, you'll like it. What do you say?"

"I can't leave," the kid said, hugging his knees. "He told me to stay here. He'll get mad if I try to leave."

"Who did? Your dad?" There was something about his features that tickled Tony's memories uneasily. Something that made him think of watching an old publicity video of his dad's, with a tiny dark-haired head peeking shyly over the edge of the table, reaching out for a toy. "Listen, kid, I'm not sure where your dad is right now, but I know he'd want you to be safe. Let's take you out to the jet, and then later when you find your mom and dad we'll bring them out to meet you. Sound good?"

"I have to stay here," the kid repeated, avoiding meeting Tony's eye. "But you don't! It's only going to get worse from here. You should go now!"

Tony was about to reiterate his argument more firmly - or possibly shelve argument altogether and just announce his intentions to grab the kid and fly back to the Quinjet - when an explosion went off from two streets over. It was accompanied by a sudden spate of combat chatter over his comm: _"Widow - Widow move left - get back, get back - get out of their path, Natasha!" "I'm trying! They're everywhere; there's no clear space -" "I am coming, Lady Widow - " "Thor! Thor, where are you going, dammit, don't - Hawkeye, cover him!" "No can do. He went out of my line of sight - I have to relocate -" _

There was another crack of lightning in the street over, then another. Then Tony heard a bellow of pain, weirdly echoing - his communicator automatically lowered the volume to keep him from being deafened, but he could hear it clearly through the fog from Thor's position.

_"Thor, give me a status. Thor? Can you answer? Iron Man!"_ Steve yelled over the communicator._ "Thor's been cut off. We need aerial support, now!"_

"Fucking shitballs!" Tony swore, then apologized. "Sorry about that. Don't say that in front of your dad, okay? Or at least don't tell him I taught it to you. Listen, I have to go, but I'll be back soon. Stay tight up here - it's pretty safe, all things considered, you didn't find a bad hiding place. I'll be right back to get you, okay?"

"No you won't," the kid said from behind him.

That last statement was so unexpected that Tony didn't actually register at first. He was already in the air and streaking over to the furthest street that the Avengers had managed to advance up to. Thor was completely hidden behind a press of heaving bodies; a group of the anencelephants had him trapped, pinned, while they flailed away mercilessly with their clubs. Thor couldn't get enough space to swing, and while he was inhumanly tough, not even he could stand up to such punishment forever.

Tony swooped down and opened with a concussion grenade right in the mass of bodies, a flash of blinding light and a BANG that rattled him even through the insulation of his suit. Most of the anencelephants peeled away, stumbling and staggering, and Tony landed in the clear space among them beside Thor's stunned and battered form. He held his palms out in opposite directions to brace himself and blasted away with both repulsors, forcing the heaving bodies away from him. The clear space widened, a gap opened up, and the rest of the Avengers rushed for it.

One monster was especially stubborn, bearing down on Tony determinedly no matter how many times he blasted it. It was even larger than the others; mud or blood or some other substance spattered its already ugly face into a grisly mask, and in two hands it clutched a heavy sledgehammer. The ground seemed to quiver under its feet as it stepped forward, tremors that could have been either the impact of its massive feet or else an earthquake. It raised the hammer in both arms for a massive downwards smash, and the force of that arc with all the monstrous muscle mass behind it might crack even Tony's shell.

But Tony got his blow in first. He skipped backwards, loading up a special armor-piercing shell as he did, and fired it directly into the barrel-like chest of his foe. The sharp missile head punched through the relatively softer tissue under the diaphragm, and then the charge went off.

It was like a small sun had ignited in the monster's chest, momentarily illuminating its warped and twisted bones from the inside. The explosion was mostly contained, the ribcage directing the explosion back in on itself, and the noise the monster let out was not even a scream as it folded limply to the pavement, its heart and lungs running out of its stomach in a liquid mess.

Steve caught up, hurrying to join Tony as he bent over Thor, checking the dazed Asgardian's condition. "He'll be fine," Tony reported as the two of them clasped Thor's forearms to haul him to his feet. "Nothing a little Ben-gay won't fix. I've got to go back, I left the civilian up there."

"Go," Steve nodded at him, mouth set and serious under the silly blue cowl. "We're going to stay in tighter formation, but we're almost to the refinery entrance - just a few more blocks. Hurry and get him to safety, then get back as soon as you can."

"Copy that," Tony said and blasted himself back into the sky. Mist billowed under his boots as he headed back to the rooftop where he'd left the kid.

Except he couldn't find the same roof again. Whether because Thor had lost his control over the weather or just of its own volition, the fog that had thinned temporarily was back with a vengeance. Even with his enhanced sensors, the buildings around Tony were a blurred uncertain mist, and no bright green blinking dot lit up his HUD a second time.

At last, he managed to find his way back to - he _thought_ - the same roof from before. Same patch of flat asphalt sheltered by sloping tiles, same grubby little window. But the kid was gone. There was nothing to show which way he'd gone - back into the house, or over the edge of the roof to the street below - nothing lit up on Tony's sensors.

_"Iron Man,"_ Steve's voice crackled over the radio. _"We've reached the building's entrance. Are you back from the rescue mission yet?"_

"Haven't even started yet, Cap," Tony replied, frustration robbing his tone of its usual teasing. "I can't find him. There's nothing on my radar."

_"The kid? He's not..." _Bruce trailed off, uncertain.

_"Have you checked the street underneath where you found him?" _Natasha suggested coolly._ "If his vital signs have ceased, your sensors might not pick him up any more."_

"I know how my sensors work, Widow, thanks, I did design them after all," Tony snapped. "There's nothing. There's not a trace."

_"Probably hiding inside the house somewhere," _Clint opined. _"I would."_

"I should still be able to see him!"

_"Shall I come aid you with the search?" _Thor asked, always helpful. Although what Thor thought he could do in this case if Tony couldn't, God only knew. _"This child, what did he look like?"_

_"We don't have time for you to search the whole town now," _Steve said, his voice firm although not without a hint of pity. _"If he's managed to hide this long, he should be all right for the next couple of hours. For now, we've got to get to the bottom of this invasion and stop it. We've got the whole town depending on us, _including _ him."_

Tony snarled wordlessly in his helmet, before shooting back up into the air with a little more thrust than he really needed to. The sudden acceleration jarred him, gave vent to some of his frustration. Because Steve Rogers, Boy Wonder, was right. _Damn_ him.

"I'm incoming," Tony reported. "Keep the kettle on for me."

_"Good, I can't wait to get under cover,"_ Clint said emphatically. _"This fucking fog is almost impossible to shoot in. And it's making me clammy."_

_"And here I thought that was your, uh... natural state," _Bruce teased him gently. Clint snorted, and Tony heard a tiny 'ow' that probably indicated that Clint had punched him.

"Why, Bruce, was that an insult I heard coming from your mouth?" Tony said. "I'm so proud of you. I think I'm finally rubbing off on you. And sharing some of my speech patterns, too."

He finally caught up with the others, landing with a whine of thrusters on the wet street. The huge refinery loomed out of the mist over their heads, an indistinct wall of greyness pocked here and there by shadows that marked vents or windows. There was a set of huge metal sliding doors set into the wall, which had been locked by a rusted chain. The remains of the chain and padlock lay on the street and the panel had been hauled open. The Avengers hurried gratefully forward into the building, relieved to be under cover once more.

Tony paused once, sending one hopeless look back outside as though he would see a small, dark-haired figure standing there.

But there was nothing. Just the billowing mist, which seemed to thicken and darken even as he looked - as though the sun were setting, even though it wasn't much past noon. Tony could barely even make out the silhouette of the buildings across the square; everything else was lost in the fog.

_It's only going to get worse from here._

Tony shivered, and turned to follow his teammates.

* * *

><p>~tbc...<p> 


	3. fear of needles (aichmophobia)

**aichmophobia**

(fear of needles)

* * *

><p>Ever since the accident - well. Ever since the accident Bruce's life had been divided into two parts - 'before' the rest of his life, and 'ever since' his world went crazy. There had been so many changes since that time, some good, (mostly) bad, that it was hard to even keep track of all of them, to remember that this wasn't always <em>normal<em> for him.

But ever since the accident, Bruce had been a little bit uncomfortable indoors. Not just in tight, closed quarters like the corridors of the Helicarrier or the military base, but even in wide-open areas with tall ceilings. Bruce couldn't help the itchy feeling that the walls and ceiling were closing tight around him, even when there was meters of free space on every side.

He just felt the uncomfortable sensation that he _should_ be taller, bigger, wider in every direction than he really _was._ And he couldn't be rid of his new awareness of just how easy it would be to break down these thin cardboard walls around him and get back into the free air.

The inside of the refinery managed to capture the feeling of being chillingly barren and messily cluttered at once. The roof overhead was high, at least twenty feet up, and lacked any kind of drop ceiling to hide the mess of bare pipes and wires that spilled in discolored bundles across it. Lights hung in regularly-spaced intervals from the intersections of the beams, but none of them were lit; somewhere in the darkness above, leaks in the roof let a slow steady drizzle of Thor's rain in. The rafters themselves almost sagged with the weight of curdling paint and flaking rust that dripped down like hairy icicles, mold and cobwebs hanging in sheet curtains from above. Where each support beam met the wall it left a long wet stain of rust across the wall beneath it, ending in a dark puddle on the floor below.

Light shone up from somewhere on the refinery floor, but it was hard to find the source of it - hard to see more than a few yards in any direction, in fact, for the open-plan floor was cluttered with ancient-looking machinery. Huge, elaborate arrangements of turbine engines and conveyer belts, storage drums and sorting troughs, pressure-wheel valves and hydraulic stamps and mechanized arms poised frozen in mid-air. To their right, a gigantic set of cogwheels sat locked in permanent stillness, the rust coating their gears and axles preventing them from moving; to their left, a gigantic set of rusting metal shelves with ominously warping legs threatened to topple their overloaded contents onto the walkways below.

Narrow alleys wound between the banks of machinery and the metal grids of the shelving units, but the floor of the factory was... _cluttered_ did not cover it; in some places it was _buried_ under a rising sea of refuse and debris. The hard, dirty concrete was only intermittently visible between sliding falls of crumbled brick, loose stacks of pipes, rotted splinters of wood and even less savory things. Where the concrete did peek through it did so with an ominous gleam of dark puddled liquid, either rainwater or oil or a mixture of both.

"Looks like this place has been abandoned for years, not days," Steve commented, sounding unnerved.

"They call it the Rust Belt for a reason, Cap," Tony responded, his voice coming out of the vocalizer flat and tinny-sounding. He clanked forward, never quite as graceful on the ground as he was in the air, kicking aside piles of refuse as he went. "Little mining towns like this one have been bleeding money and population for decades. Probably they couldn't afford to afford to keep it up, but also couldn't afford to shut it down - it's the only source of employment in a fifty-mile radius. So it just keeps running until the whole thing rusts down around their ears."

"The lights are still on," Natasha said softly. She seemed relaxed and poised, gun held barrel-downward as she peered around the stacks of shelving; only someone who knew her well could have caught the hint of unease in her voice and her eyes. "The rest of the town is completely out."

"A place like this probably has its own generators," Clint said, peering around. "I mean, they _made_ the fuel for the rest of the town, here."

"Maybe the townspeople retreated here when the rest of the town's power got cut," Steve said, ever the optimist. He raised his voice and shouted, "Hello? Anyone here? We're the Avengers and we're here to help!"

Steve's voice ratcheted through the vaulted chamber, echoes chasing each other through the rank shadows. For a long minute, there was no other sound in the refinery other than the rain dripping steadily down.

Then, somewhere on the far side of the building, one of the machines started up. It had the racking, revving noise of a chainsaw preparing to bite into wood or metal, but with a dozen other mechanical voices mixed in. The lights on the walls and ceiling flickered and shifted in response to some movement, but from their current position they couldn't see where the noise or the light was coming from. The Avengers looked at each other, unnerved.

"Well," Bruce said. "That's... not promising."

"It doesn't necessarily mean anything," Tony said flippantly. "They could be automated, set to turn on at a set time or something."

"There's no point in sitting here guessing. We're supposed to be getting down to the lower levels," Natasha reminded them.

"Yes, but we're also supposed to be doing search-and-rescue of the town's citizens. If they've taken shelter in here, we should at least check on their status," Steve said decisively. "Let's try and find the source of the noise."

"There's a catwalk running along the top side," Clint noted, having picked out the high vantage points as soon as he walked in the door. "I'll get up there and take a look."

"I'll go with you," Tony said immediately, and with Steve's nod and signal the two of them boosted off the dirty ground floor and swarmed (or rocketed) their way along the catwalks. The rest of the Avengers began to follow along as best they could on the ground, cautiously picking their way over the piles of shifting debris and ducking under the extruding arms of the machines.

Bruce hung back a little, letting the others establish a perimeter before he followed along behind; he took the opportunity to browse the shelves a little bit and pick up a few spare pieces for the device he was constructing. He wouldn't trust the integrity of any electronic parts left out in this wet and dirty environment for more than a few days, but he figured you couldn't go wrong with a screwdriver and a glass plate.

He eyed the banks of machinery dubiously as he ducked around them. Bruce was in STEM himself, and he'd taken a year's worth of courses in engineering back at MIT, but he had to admit he had no idea what half of these machines were _for._ He'd always been interested in the more... abstract side of things, and not really into heavy machinery. A few things, he could reasonably guess were involved in the sorting, handling and processing of raw coke, but some of the other banks of machines just looked... strange. Too many sharp edges and too many saw teeth, too many chains hanging off into nothing.

"I'm not seeing anyone in here, Cap," Clint reported back from his vantage on the catwalk; Bruce could see his shadowed form moving over a suspended walkway overhead. From this distance and in this lighting, Bruce could hardly see _him,_ but he knew better than to discount Hawkeye's sharp eyesight. "Just machines and more machines."

"Not picking up anything alive on the sensors, either," Tony's voice crackled over the comm. "This place is completely deserted."

Disappointment was clear on Steve's face, but he nodded acceptance of the negative results. "All right, we'll start making our way downstairs," he decided. "Iron Man, Hawkeye, do you see any sign of -"

At first, Bruce mistook the faint vibration under his feet and the rumbling in the air for residual noise from the nearby machinery. Not until the shelves to his left started rattling ominously did he realize what he was feeling: the very ground beneath his feet was trembling, and getting louder every second.

Bruce had first noticed the tremors out on the street, but he hadn't thought anything of it at the time - they were so faint and passed so quickly as not to be any kind of a threat. The same wasn't true any longer; these tremors were stronger, causing the concrete underfoot to ripple dangerously and the metal shelving to creak and groan as their topheavy structures were pushed out of their fragile equilibrium.

"Watch out!" he yelled, probably redundant given that the noise and jostling was unmistakable now. The shelves close to him were rocking dangerously now, a few loose items sliding forward to pelt him like painful, heavy rain. He flung up one hand to shield himself as he flailed about with the other for something to grab on to, his feet unsteady on the loose and shifting ground.

Bruce looked about wildly, panic beginning to rise as he realized there was no safe route to get away from the shelving that was about to come down on his head. The aisle he was standing in ran left and right without a break, and the trash scattered underfoot made for treacherous footing. He scrambled awkwardly back the way he had come, as the lesser of two evils, but had only gotten a little less than halfway to safety before the ground gave one final jolt and the shelving unit came sliding down.

The next moment Thor was there, one arm shooting over Bruce's head to brace the half-ton metal structure in the process of crashing down. The contents of the shelves continued to slither and rain down all around him, and Bruce ducked and covered his head with both arms as he climbed and scrabbled over the mounds of debris towards a clear exit. He was almost there when one ankle twisted painfully on a loose brick, and he fell half forward onto his elbows and knees.

A strong black-clad hand reached for him and grabbed his hand, pulling him briskly towards clear ground. Bruce gratefully took hold of Natasha's arm and let her tow him along to safety, glancing briefly over his shoulder as he did to see Thor still bracing the shelving unit with one hand.

"Clear!" Natasha called to him and Thor glanced over his shoulder, saw Bruce standing safely free and jumped backwards, letting the mass of sharp and rusting metal come roaring down on the spot he'd been a moment earlier.

The three of them took a moment to compose themselves, catching their breath in the drifting dust and flaked metal in the aftermath of the tremor. "Are you well, Banner?" Thor asked earnestly, seemingly unfazed by the near-disaster, his blue eyes concerned only for his teammates.

"I'm fine," Bruce said, still catching his breath. He glanced down to see his half-assembled device still clutched in one hand; he hadn't even thought to put it down in the panic of the moment. "A little bruised and shaken, but nothing serious."

He glanced over to see Natasha studying him intently. "I'm a little bit surprised you're still with us," she observed.

Bruce blinked. He hadn't really thought about that; he wasn't _angry_ exactly, not at the moment, but the elevated heart rate and the pain of the bruises he'd collected would normally be enough to have the Other Guy struggling for control. "So am I," he said, surprised and a little bit confused.

"Hey, you guys okay over there?" Tony demanded over the comm. Bruce glanced up to see Tony and Clint still clinging to the catwalk overhead; Clint nearer to them, Tony a little further off. "What the hell was that just now?"

"Earth tremor," Bruce supplied helpfully. "We had a few outside, as well, but you were in the air most of the time so you probably didn't notice."

"Well, _great,"_ Tony said, completely disgusted. "Seismic activity, that's _just_ what I'm looking forward to when we're about to head undergrou -"

His complaint was cut off mid-word as the metal catwalk he and Clint were both standing on twisted and warped, then snapped completely, dumping both its passengers straight down onto the bank of machines below.

Which picked just this moment to churn into life.

The nearest turbine roared alight, fan blades picking up with unholy speed as the gears and belt leading towards it engaged. The teeth of the gears caught at Clint's clothing and dragged him inexorably downwards, his hands grabbing frantically at mid-air and catching nothing. From this angle Bruce couldn't see exactly what got Tony, but he disappeared from sight like a man being sucked into quicksand. His repulsor blasts fired once, twice, but he must not have been at an angle for it to do any good, because the screeching roar of the machinery didn't falter.

Steve moved first, as fast as thought: he turned and threw his shield with pinpoint accuracy, jamming into the gears of the belt dragging Clint towards his death and grinding them to a halt. The machinery shrieked and rumbled, gears grinding agonizingly as the metal teeth tried and failed to chew through the indestructible material of the shield. Steve vaulted onto the edge of the belt and grabbed Clint's flailing hand, leaning backwards to throw all his weight against the pull of the machinery. "Thor! Help me first!" he shouted over his shoulder, calling the Asgardian to his side. "Trust Tony's armor - help Clint!"

The shouting and clamor rose about him and Bruce clutched at his ears, trying to regain some kind of control out of the chaos. Natasha was at his side, then gone; she had hold of Clint's other arm and was dragging him back out of the deadly maw of the machine, a rent torn down his leather vest and the top of his leg and blood streaming from it freely.

But that still left Tony in the grip of the rogue machine, and if he could blast his way free he would have done it already, and this was no place for mild-mannered scientist Bruce Banner. He took a deep breath and closed his eyes, reaching inside of himself for the beast he spent so much time, so much sweat and so much blood struggling to maintain.

_Now,_ he urged to the Other Guy inside of him. _Tony's in danger. We need you now!_

There was no answer.

"Bruce!" Natasha shouted at him; when Bruce opened his eyes she was on her knees beside a groaning Clint, applying pressure to the wound. "We need the Hulk. Tony's still in there!"

Bruce looked around; he saw Steve and Thor both struggling with a wire monstrosity a dozen yards away. The wreckage of another machine that had been in their way sat sparking and twitching between them, but Thor dared not swing his hammer or call lightning while Tony was trapped. The two of them were fighting against the machine that seemed more and more alive the longer Bruce looked at it; huge pistons flailed at the sides like the legs of a spider, and steam hissed from valves in the front that could almost, if one had an overactive imagination, form a face; grotesque and unsmiling, with pilot flames burning in the eyes and a mouth full of hundreds of tiny jagged fangs.

Desperate, he clenched his eyes shut and called once more within him, carelessly throwing all his pain and fear for Tony and _fury_ that this had happened to them, that an inanimate _machine_ would think to threaten Iron Man, would hurt what was _his, his;_ he pulled it into himself and shoved it into a boiling rage, driving and lashing the beast within him to respond. _Come out! Now! Come **OUT!**_

Somewhere, Bruce heard the sound of a bestial howl of fury.

But it wasn't coming from him.

_"Bruce!"_ Natasha screamed at him. _"Hurry up!"_

"I'm trying, I _can't!"_ Bruce screamed back at her. She shot him an incredulous look that flensed him to the bone, then in the next moment she was up and sprinting towards the melee.

"Help him!" she snarled over her shoulder, and Bruce quickly stumbled over to Clint's side and dropped to one knee beside him. The archer was already trying to sit up, groggy and uncoordinated; there was blood flowing from his head as well as from his side. Bruce pushed him gently back down and checked his head wound; it was bleeding copiously, but didn't look terribly serious.

Natasha had left her pack with the medical supplies with them, bless her (Bruce didn't tend to carry supplies, since pretty much anything he carried tended to get dropped or crushed when the Other Guy emerged.) Bruce pulled out gauze rolls and antibiotic wipes and applied them automatically, most of his mind racing on the complete inexplicable fact of the Hulk's refusal to show up.

There was a _crash_ from behind him, the sound of more repulsors firing, and then the shriek of tearing metal. Abruptly the sound of the engine died from a roar to a whine, the turbines thumping restlessly as they died into silence, and when Bruce looked up again Thor was pulling Tony out of the wreckage of the machine and to his feet.

"I'm okay, I'm okay," Tony kept repeating over the comm, and despite knowing full well how often that statement was a lie when Tony said it, that was all that kept Bruce from leaping to his feet and running to his side. He tottered a few steps, then sat heavily on a (completely inert) pile of rubber tubing. "Hang on a moment, camera's busted, I can't see a thing. Holy shit, that was like being caught in the autodismantler on meth."

"Easy my friend," Thor said, steadying him easily despite the weight of the suit.

"I can hold it," Clint mumbled, putting his hand on the gauze pad next to Bruce's, and Bruce gave him a quick distracted smile and lurched to his feet, hurrying over towards the others. He took Thor's place by Tony's side, and helped him as rigid and inflexible armored digits groped clumsily for the manual-release switches on the faceplate. Bruce's own fingers were trembling more than a little, and he didn't breathe easily again until the metal plate cleared and he saw Tony's eyes clearly once again.

"I'm okay," Tony said again, softer now that the words were spoken to Bruce's ears and not just to the static airwaves. Bruce slid his hands along Tony's cheeks, fingers twining in the short black curls that escaped the edge of his helmet to frame his face, and sighed with relief.

"Is everyone all right?" Steve asked, calling them back to the present moment. "Iron Man? Good. Hawkeye?"

"I'll be fine," Clint said, only slightly feeble. "It's just a flesh wound, it'll be fine once it stops bleeding. Doc did a good job patching me up."

Steve looked at him and nodded. "Then we need to get back on our feet and move. This place is more dangerous than we thought. Unless we know what caused that machine to go haywire, we don't know that any of these others could do the same at any moment."

"Are there more of that same kind?" Bruce asked in alarm.

"I know not," Thor said. "But we will not be taken unawares again. Let us seek out any other traps that lie in wait, and destroy them before they may try to destroy us."

Shortly after that, the Avengers were back on their feet and fanning out through the factory again, much more wary and cautious than before. The narrow, twisty aisles wouldn't let them walk more than two abreast - especially not if they wanted to stay out of arm's reach of the banks of machinery on either side - so they broke into three pairs, each careful to stay within sight and call of the others.

"Do you know exactly what we're looking for?" Bruce said dubiously. "I didn't get a good look at it before it got... dissassembled."

"Not really," Clint replied. "It was just another hunk of metal until Iron Man and I fell right on top of it. I could swear, though, that it was completely dead before then. Like it was just waiting - _shit."_

The yelp echoed around the cavern, swiftly summoning the others to them. Steve and Natasha arrived from the right, Thor and Tony from the left, and the entire team just stopped and stared at the apparatus before them.

"Fucking hell," Clint swore, and Bruce couldn't really think of anything else to say to that.

The machine in front of them now was... It was a machine. Bruce could feel confident saying that much. It had a solid metal frame reinforced with struts, a wide open-backed square with ratchets to adjust the size of the open square. It had levers and it had gears, big heavy square-tooth gears ready to spin up and turn force into motion: pushing, pulling, grinding.

But there were other things attached to this machine that Bruce didn't understand. Didn't _want_ to understand. Like the big saw-toothed blades extending from metal arms that hovered over the open gap, waiting for the gears to turn to descent. Like the huge open-gauge needles, the fine pincers poised to dive in and rip and tear. The long, stained funnels and troughs running off to each side and under the machine to carry spillage away.

Like the perfectly human-sized shackles hanging empty at each of the corners, welded tight to the frame.

Steve was the first one to find his voice, half-strangled by the look of sick fascination on his face. "What were they _doing_ in here?" he exclaimed.

"Homebrewing Soylent Green, maybe?" Tony suggested, although the humor - gallows-dark to begin with - fell flat.

"This is the blackest magic," Thor said, his face dark and clouded. "I have never seen its like before."

Bruce shook his head, averting his eyes from the wide red-brown rust stains - God, he _hoped_ those were rust stains. Due to the high amount of iron content in blood, it looked functionally almost identical to iron oxide when it corroded. "There are some questions I don't think need to be answered."

"This one might, though," Natasha said quietly. Her face was set, her expression cool as she faced the machine, although Bruce caught a tiny quiver in her voice that belied the stoic exterior. She was not truly emotionless, merely very, very good at controlling her emotions. That was something Bruce could understand, like no other. Sometimes he wondered if, should Natasha's control someday break, it would be as disastrous for her as a similar loss of control always was for him. "If the townsfolk were... experimenting... with paranormal forces, it might go some way to explaining what happened here."

"Or if they were taken over by some outside force," Steve theorized hopefully, providing a less-damning explanation, "which took over and used this building as a base. Either way, if we could figure out who it was - AIM, maybe, or HYDRA -"

"I don't think we need to go that far afield for an explanation," Clint interrupted. So far he'd been the only one with the stomach to venture closer to the grisly machine, although he was careful not to touch it. "We can just ask Iron Man what it's for."

"Why me?" Tony exploded. "Just because I'm the engineer, you think I know anything about every machine that was ever built? Why would you ask me as if I'd know?"

Clint looked up at him, and his expression was dark. "Because this thing has the Stark Industries logo on it," he said.

_"WHAT?"_ A wash of static followed in the wake of Tony's shout. As a group, they all scrambled to look where Clint was indicating - and just as he'd said, there was the familiar logo. A stylized, slightly misshapen globe, capped with an elongated chevron, with STARK INDUSTRIES printed underneath.

Hesitantly Steve offered, "Is it possible that - someone in your company authorized this without - without you knowing?"

A moment of silence, no one quite sure what to say, before Tony broke it. "No," he said. "No. That is not... that is not an SI product. Look at it. It's not - it's not even the real logo, for fuck's sake. The shape is distorted, and the font isn't - It's just some kind of knock-off." He backed away, as though he could distance himself from the monstrosity before him just by moving away. "Even before the reorg I set off when I became Iron Man, Stark Industries didn't do... this stuff. We didn't make farm butchering equipment, or get into kinky fetish shit like this, we just made weapons."

"Weapons made to tear people apart?" Thor asked..

_"No!"_

The strain in his voice worried Bruce, scared him. Bruce knew the signs; Tony was halfway on the way to a panic attack, getting more and more wound up with every second. This was no time for that, no place; Bruce couldn't talk him down if they weren't in a safe place, and this was as far from 'safe' as you could get. "Tony," Bruce said quietly, reaching forward to take Tony's elbow. "Remember your heart. If you don't calm down..."

Natasha's sharp, clear eyes landed on him. "You seem remarkably calm yourself, Doctor Banner," she said.

That was enough to deflect some of the attention from Tony onto Bruce, and he wished he could be more thankful for it. "What do you mean?" Bruce said, shifting uneasily.

"Come to think of it, you reverted back from the Hulk especially fast this time," Steve said, scrutinizing Bruce carefully.

"No he didn't," Clint said. "He never went Hulk at all. He was with me the whole time, treating my leg. Not that I don't appreciate the assist, Doc."

"What?" Thor frowned. "But I heard the Bulk's battle cry. I am most sure of it."

"That wasn't me," Bruce said quietly, before the three of them could get into another argument. They turned to stare at him in astonishment.

"You said you _can't_," Natasha said. "What do you mean? I thought the trouble was making sure the other guy _didn't_ come out."

"It _is, _usually," Bruce said emphatically. "I don't know. I don't understand it, either. He should have come out five times over by now, and yet..." He folded his hands across his chest, groping for words.

It was doubly hard - not only were there not any usual words in the English language designed for communing with an alternate personality who lived inside your head and had a body of his own, but he _hated_ talking about it. "I can't reach him. Inside. Usually I can hear him, even when he's not in charge, but - he's not _there_ any more."

The more he concentrated, the more sure he was, and if the circumstances were different he would have celebrated. Alone in his head, in his body, for the first time_ ever since._ Quiet in his mind, peaceful in his soul - it was everything he'd ever wanted, and given up ever believing he could have again.

And of course, because it was _his_ fucking life, it had to happen at the absolute _worst possible time._

"But if he's not in you any more," Steve said slowly, obviously struggling to grasp the concept but willing to trust Bruce. "Then _where_ ... is he?"

The distant roar sounded again, echoing through the refinery, and all of them went still.

"How is this possible?" Natasha demanded.

"I don't know, but apparently it _is," _ Bruce said.

"Hang on," Tony said, standing abruptly and clanking towards Bruce. His face was a study in worry as he grasped Bruce's upper arm, a mix of anger and tight fear. "If the other guy is missing, then then that means - you're vulnerable down here."

Bruce blinked. That was an aspect of things he hadn't even thought of. "I... guess so, yeah," he said slowly.

"We're _all_ vulnerable down here, if the Big Guy isn't on our team," Clint said flatly.

Tony seized Bruce's other arm, pulling him around to face the inventor. "Then that means, you have to go," he said urgently. "We need to take you back outside, back out to the Quinjet."

"Tony, what are you talking about?" Bruce demanded. "Why?"

"I mean you're in danger!" Tony said tightly. "Normally the Hulk, he watches your back... yeah, he watches out for all of us, but no matter what happens_ you_ wouldn't be hurt while he's in charge. But if he isn't here, then you're completely defenseless!"

"We haven't got time to go back and start over," Natasha started. Tony whirled to face her.

"Then we'll fucking make time!" he shouted. "He's just plain _human _now! Don't you guys get it?"

"Half of our team is 'just plain' human, that has never stopped us," Natasha snapped. "We don't run away from things just because it gets a little dangerous!"

"What I get is that our biggest asset just turned into our biggest liability," Steve said. Bruce felt mildly offended by that, but he supposed he couldn't really argue with either half of that sentence.

"Tony," Bruce interrupted him, and Tony turned back to him, a terrible expression on his face. Bruce let his voice go gentle. "You need to calm down. I'm not in any more danger than I was a few minutes ago."

"And you could have been killed, a few minutes ago!" Tony shouted. "This isn't a game any more. You could get hurt!"

"Well so far, I don't have a scratch on me," Bruce said mildly. "While _you're _the one who's just been put through a blender."

"Hey, what am I, chopped liver?" Clint piped up from the background.

Tony waved that argument away with a dismissive hand. "That doesn't matter," he said.

Bruce ignored Clint, looking Tony straight in the eye. "Is this the part where you do that thing where you somehow think you matter less than other people?" he said. "Because I have to tell you that is a serious turn-off."

"Look, Bruce has a better understanding than any of us about the peculiarities of the energy fields down here," Natasha argued.

"No, no, I'm with Tony," Clint volunteered. "This mission is going to be hard enough without dragging along deadweight."

"_Deadweight?"_ Tony demanded, his voice rising dangerously.

"I trust Bruce with my life," Thor said stoutly. "I would not turn him away from battle now."

"All right, guys, enough arguing. As leader of the team, this is my call to make," Steve said. He took a deep breath, then exhaled. "Okay. Okay. Bruce, I have absolutely the highest regard for you, but we can't carry out this mission and guarantee your safety at the same time. If the Hulk isn't available, then escorting you would just slow us down. We're going to take you back to the edge of town, and you'll wait in the Quinjet until we return."

_"Thank_ you," Tony said, sarcasm only barely covering up the underlying gratitude.

"I understand," Bruce said, and pushed down a twinge of disappointed hurt. Of course, he recognized the truth in everything Steve had said - and Clint, and even Tony. Logically he knew it was the right choice. But logic couldn't silence the little voice that whispered deep in his mind,_ see how quickly they get rid of you when they can no longer **use** you. When you can no longer give them **him.**_

* * *

><p>~tbc...<p> 


	4. fear of spiders (arachnophobia)

**arachnophobia**

(fear of spiders)

* * *

><p>The Avengers turned back to retrace their steps towards the refinery entrance, the mood more than a little subdued. Even if nobody wanted to say so out loud, they all knew that losing the Hulk from their lineup severely reduced their effective firepower. They'd always known that when things got bad, they'd have the Other Guy to back them up. Now they didn't. And they hadn't even gotten close to their goal yet; no one knew just how many more obstacles would lie ahead. It was more than discouraging to encounter a roadblock so big so early in the mission; it was frightening, too.<p>

Bruce took advantage of the silence on the walk back to their starting point to finish the project he'd been working on, now that his time with the team was limited. It wasn't actually a difficult construction by any means, just hard to do while walking and being assaulted by various forms of sharp rusty jagged pieces of metal.

"All right," he said, when he shut the casing with a satisfying _click_ and held the device up to the light. "Take this with you. It'll come in handy."

"What is it?" Thor asked.

"A directional indicator," Bruce said. Judging by the looks he received, that wasn't very helpful, so he tried to elaborate (_without_ getting into terminology that would lose all but possibly Tony.) "It's attuned to the unique wavelengths of the energy field here. Hold it level, and the indicator dial - here - should align to the directionality of the waves. In other words, it'll point to where the energy is strongest - which should be where you need to go."

"So basically, it's a compass," Natasha translated.

"Except instead of pointing north, it points towards weird shit," Clint added.

"Basically," Bruce agreed. At the moment, the needle was pointing behind them, and slightly downwards - he'd suspended it in a liquid bath, just so that it would be able to indicate in three dimensions rather than two. "Given the way all the rest of our equipment has gone haywire - I thought, just in case - it would be good to have."

"You reinvented the compass, that's fucking awesome," Tony said, with the heavy sarcasm his voice sometimes got when he was being especially sincere. "In the heat of the craziest situations, it takes a special mind to recreate a concept that's been around nearly as long as the wheel."

"Tony, the wheel's been around since the Sumerians. The compass is four thousand years, _at most,_ and there's still some scientific disagreement over whether the Chinese 'north-facing chariot' was actually a compass at all -"

"Enough," Steve interrupted. "Thanks, Bruce. This'll really help us out - and even if it doesn't, it was a good thought."

Embarrassed, Bruce ducked his head. It was a small thing, really, that he could help out the team in this way; but it did help quiet the little voice inside him a bit.

The warm feeling, however, gradually faded as they keep walking through the mazelike aisles of the refinery and no exit comes in sight. Bruce looked around him, frowning; he had one eye on his device while they walked, so he wasn't fully paying attention, but he was pretty sure... "Um, guys?" he said. "Shouldn't we have reached the exit by now?"

Clint was beginning to look uneasy as well. "Maybe we passed it," he muttered.

"No," Steve said, staring hard at the unmarked section of wall in front of him. "This is the place."

"What?" Tony stared at him. "Are you sure?"

Steve tapped his head. "Photographic memory," he said. "This was where we came in. The door should be here. But it's not."

They examined the panel of wall closely, even running their hands over the corrugated metal panels to make sure it wasn't some kind of advanced camouflage or even illusion. But the story their hands told was the same as their eyes: it was only an unmarked wall.

"Doors don't just _disappear,"_ Clint said, his voice high and strangled. "I mean - normally."

"Nothing about this place has been normal since we came in," Natasha said grimly.

"It matters not," Thor declared, stepping forward and hefting Mjolnir. "These walls may be metal, but against the might of Mjolnir they shall not hold for long."

"Now hold on, Thor," Steve objected. "We don't know what's out there. There could be more of those creatures -"

"Anencelephants," Tony put in helpfully.

"Then we shall slay them as we did the others," Thor said easily. "The important thing is that we get our comrade to safety. Stand back, my friends!"

Steve looked like he might have argued further, but quickly thought better of it. The Avengers scrambled back a few steps, and Thor raised his hammer up and back to get leverage for the swing. The first blow put a huge dent in the wall; the second burst it open like a popped blister. The Avengers started forward -

And stopped, staring.

On the other side of the wall was - nothing. Darkness. Empty blackness. A shadow which sent chills up and down Bruce's spine, meeting in the middle to form a cold knot of tension behind his breastbone. Not a single spark of light penetrated this darkness, the sort of darkness that lurked in closets and under beds and behind doors of childhood terrors.

"What is this, a storeroom?" Clint said, staring into the emptiness. " I swear that wasn't on the plans. Was it?"

"Not on the plans I have," Steve answered. "And even if it did, this _should_ have been an exterior wall. We ought to be looking at the street."

"Uhm, correct me if I'm wrong, but it's a little early for the sun to go down, isn't it?" Bruce said, trying to lighten the mood with a half-joking tone.

"It's only four-thirty," Tony said in a flat voice. His face was grim. "Which means that _something_ is playing games."

"Why hesitate?" Thor asked, stepping forward and hefting Mjolnir. "We are not children, to be cowed by darkness. Let us proceed, and whatever wicked beast lurks in this shadow, we will defeat him as handily as all the others."

"Wait," Natasha said, putting a hand on Thor's forearm to stop his forward motion. Her expression was always hard to read, but right now it was closed off and wary, with a tension in it that Bruce had seen on her face only a few times before: fear. "Don't rush into anything just yet. We don't yet know what this is."

"I hate not knowing things," Tony said, and raised his arm. A little panel flipped up from his bicep, and a small metal construct unfolded itself in a twinkling of lights and beeps. Bruce recognized it by the pattern of LEDs on the front; it was one of Tony's sensor drones, equipped with lights and cameras and fitted into one of his Iron Man missile casings. "Bombs away, folks."

The drone launched itself forward in a rush of expelled air and whirred through the hole that Thor had made in the wall, zooming into the shadow beyond. The twinkling LEDs were clearly visible as it passed over the threshhold and into the darkness.

-And then the lights died as the device shut itself off, and fell without a sound.

The six of them stared after it. "What the fuck," Tony said, his voice strangled.

"What do you see? On your monitors?" Bruce asked him.

"Nothing," Tony said. "Nothing at all. This isn't right." He grabbed at his wrist and raised his arm again, this time firing off one of his small portable missiles into the darkness. The rocket lit up in a blaze of yellow light and launched itself forward, following the path of the drone... and they all watched its flight turn into a sudden drop, the flare of the rocket dying as it fell into darkness.

Cautiously, Bruce picked up a shard of rusted metal from the ground nearby, ringing and clanging painfully as it dragged against the concrete. He heaved it with both hands through the hole, and waited for the noise of it hitting the ground beyond.

It never did.

"I don't think," Bruce said, and had to swallow. "I don't think we should try going out there ourselves. Even if it's not the Vashta Nerada out there... it doesn't look safe."

"What the _fuck,"_ Clint said for all of them. "What is this shit?"

"Magic?" Thor suggested hesitantly, staring at Mjolnir and then the hole in the wall like it had betrayed him.

"_Don't_ say it's fucking magic!" Tony snapped. "It's bullshit! So are we just trapped in here? All of us, Bruce included? We're just sitting ducks until someone picks us all off? Fuck that. I'm going to blast a hole in the roof if that's what it takes, fly out of here -"

"Okay, let's get one thing straight," Clint said, rounding on Tony. "Are you freaking out because one of us is in danger, or because _your boyfriend_ is in danger?"

Tony glared at him. "I know damn well what you're implying," he snarled. "And _fuck you very much_ for that. I'd do the same for any of you, if you were in danger. I _know_ how to separate my personal life and my job as Iron Man, and if you think I'd compromise the good of the team just because of who I happen to be sleeping with -"

"Tony," Bruce interrupted quietly. "Please calm down. We can't afford to fight like this."

"Why am I the one who has to calm down? Why can't Clint learn to shut his fat mouth for a change? Just because _his_ fuckbuddy is a stone-cold murder machine -"

"Don't you fucking bring her into this -" Clint started in on him.

"Will all of you just be quiet!" Steve shouted, exasperation and what sounded a little bit like fear making his voice sharp. He raised his hands and pushed his cowl back for a moment, running his hands through his hair and clutching sharply. At last he lowered them with a deep exhale. "All right. All right. It's clear that this is a dead end, unless one of you bright boys can figure out a way to dismantle a magic spell?"

Unwillingly, they all shook their heads one by one.

"Then our plan hasn't changed," Steve said. "We get to the center of this and stop it, and then we'll _all_ leave. Together."

Tony began to protest, but Steve held up a hand to stall him. "No more arguments, Iron Man," he said in a voice of command. "We'll do our best to keep Bruce safe. You know we will. Just because we aren't... living with him... the way you are, doesn't mean we love him any less."

Tony held his gaze for a long moment, then dropped his eyes, ashamed.

"So... um," Bruce said into the awkward silence that followed, and then held up his device. "I'll just hold onto this, okay? So the rest of you have your hands free."

"Sounds good," Steve said, forcing a normal tone. "Lead the way, Doctor Banner."

They picked their way carefully around the perimeter of the factory floor, only skirting through the narrow aisles when they had absolutely no other choice. They picked their way around the banks of machinery with exquisite care; as Bruce passed by the machines, he would often hear the growl and rev of an engine as it lurched into motion, hear the straining whine of moving parts as they struggled towards him. When he passed out of their reach, they subsided into lifeless hunks of metal once again.

At last they came to an island in the sea of chaos, a large reinforced pillar that housed a phone, electrics tower and elevator shaft. The elevator itself was lifeless, warning tape stretched across its rusted-shut doors, but around behind it a heavy metal slab door opened into a stairwell leading down.

"Is it just me or does this seem too easy?" Tony asked.

"Just like a pitcher plant," Natasha muttered, barely loud enough for Bruce to hear. He wasn't sure if the others would get the reference, anyway.

Pitcher plants were a type of carnivorous plant, like the venus fly trap - except instead of a spring-loaded trap which snapped shut, the pitcher plant had a long, narrow cavity in its stem. The plant walls were lined with fine, stiff hairs all pointed downwards - to ensure that a hapless insect's way in would be smooth and effortless, but to struggle back out again would be impossible.

"I'm more of a catcher than a pitcher, anyway," Tony quipped. Bruce briefly closed his eyes, but decided that telling Tony to cut it out would just draw more attention to it.

"Seriously, Stark, too much information," Clint groaned.

"Oh, I didn't know you played baseball, Tony," Steve said innocently. Bruce often wondered just how often Steve was serious about not getting innuendo and when he was just trolling them, but he seemed sincere this time.

"I don't," Tony said. "Really, do I need to spell it out? Make a powerpoint presentation, maybe?"

"Nay, we have power enough on this expedition," Thor assured him seriously.

Bruce listened to their banter with half an ear as they made their way carefully down the stairs. The lights down here didn't burn steadily, like the ones in the factory above - the cheap tube fluorescents flickered and buzzed at an eye-searing frequency, occasionally dropping out for a few seconds and plunging sections of the stairs into darkness. They descended the stairwell cautiously, two at a time in the narrow passageway, with Bruce in the middle - the most protected position. The others all had their weapons out - Thor's hammer, Steve's shield, Hawkeye's bow, Natasha's guns, and Tony's, well, everything - but all Bruce had to hold onto was the detector he'd made, pointing the way steadily to the northeast as they went down the spirals. At least the thugs they'd encountered couldn't fit in these narrow tunnels.

It was strange - ever since he'd realized that he couldn't Hulk out, Bruce had been consumed by a kind of strange clarity. The world seemed bright-lit and sharp-edged, every movement flashing in the corner of his eye, and he could feel every inch of his skin in a kind of fizzing terror.

The truth was that for all he hated what the accident had done to his life, Bruce had kind of come to take for granted the fact that normal, everyday dangers just weren't a threat to him any more. He didn't risk much more than a few scratches or bruises before the Other Guy would assert himself and take care of whatever the threat was, with extreme prejudice. He had been too preoccupied with the risk of hurting someone _else _that he hadn't really paid much attention to the fact that he could no longer be hurt.

Now he didn't have that guarantee any more. Now he was, in terms of vulnerability, just like any other man. It didn't feel as good as he'd thought it would.

Bruce knew better than to fool himself - there had been a moment, just a moment, where the thought had flashed in his mind that this was the perfect opportunity. A chance to make an ending that might never come again. But he'd pushed it aside almost as soon as it had formed - he wouldn't do that to his teammates and most importantly, he couldn't do that to Tony. Things were good, now, better than they had been in a long time, and Bruce wouldn't throw that away in a moment of cowardice.

Not that it was necessarily going to be up to him.

He estimated they'd gone down two and a half flights before the stairs leveled out into a concrete antechamber, a single closed fire door ahead of them with a red-colored bulb burning steadily in a wire cage above it. There was a digital readout next to it, now cracked and darkened; the door itself was held shut by a chain and padlock threaded through a deadbolt slot. Steve took ahold of it and yanked, and the rusty links twisted and snapped; the door swung open on creaky hinges.

The corridor led away before them, with shadowed openings spaced along the left and right. If anything, it was even filthier down here than it had been on the factory floor above. Crumbling plastics, rotting paint and lumps of rust had all run together in the oil-slick water to produce a coating of sludge that lay over everything, punctuating each footstep with a wet sucking noise.

This room looked like it might have been a break room, once; prefab benches and chairs were piled in heaps along the shadowed wall, and there was a corrugated-looking refrigerator in the corner that Bruce had absolutely no desire to open. Spaced out along the walls were large square patches of color that might once have been posters - motivational or perhaps safety reminders. Whatever they had once been, the writing was all but obliterated by water damage and thick black lines that ran back and forward over the writing.

Out of the corner of his eye Bruce caught sight of a quick movement - a quick patch of moving darkness seen only in his peripheral vision, gone before he could focus his eyes on it. He'd lived in enough squalid places to recognize the fleeting movements of mice and rats, running along the baseboards and into cracks for safety; he would have assumed what he had seen was just another rat, if not for the fact that it had been running along the _top_ of the wall. Were his eyes just playing tricks on him? What else could it have been? Cockroaches, perhaps, but even in the humid heat of southern India Bruce had never seen a cockroach get _that_ big...

Unnerved, he tried to put the momentary flicker out of his mind as the team moved down along the corridor. But now that the idea had been planted, he couldn't stop seeing those little flickers of movement - always gone right before he turned his head.

They passed by another room on the left, this one cluttered with the broken-down remains of office furniture. The lights sputtered briefly in that room, and Bruce's head snapped around as a silhouette caught his eye; short and skinny, no higher than his chest, he could have sworn he saw the shape of a child standing in the middle of the room, watching them uncertainly as they passed by.

"You shouldn't go digging around in other people's stuff," a high, piping voice warned him. "You don't know what you're going to find."

But when Bruce took off his glasses, rubbed his swimming eyes, and put them back on again, the figure was gone.

Hesitantly Bruce ventured into the room, wary of movement that might presage something else jumping out at him. No one did, and after staring at the empty room for a moment he carefully stooped down and peered under the table that was the only possible hiding place for a child that size. It was empty.

How could he possibly have disappeared so thoroughly? Had he ever actually been there at all? Given how many traps and dangers the boy would have had to get through to get this far in the first place, Bruce almost hoped not.

He moved carefully around the border of the room searching for any sign of the child he'd just seen - or at least some sign of what might have happened to him. There was nothing, except a glint of metal sitting on a shelf directly behind where the child had been standing. Bruce went over to the shelf and looked down.

A knife was resting on the shelf - a huge, ugly, heavy thing with a darkened handle and a serrated blade. Bruce stared at it, then reached out a careful hand to nudge it - he didn't particularly want to pick it up - in order to read the label attached. In bold block letters the knife was labeled: **FOR CHILDREN.**

"Bruce?" a voice called from ahead. He turned to see Natasha standing in the doorway, turned to look at him. "Everything okay?"

"I..." Bruce backed away from the shelf, his arms and legs beginning to shake as hot bile rose in his throat. He didn't understand this; he didn't _want_ to understand. He just wanted to put as much distance between himself and that knife as possible. "Nothing. It's nothing. I thought I saw movement in here but... no." And by all that was holy, the last thing he wanted was Natasha deciding to pick _up_ that thing to _use_ it. "It's completely empty."

Natasha looked at him for a moment, then gave a little nod and reached out to put a guiding hand on his elbow. "We'd better get going," she said. "We don't want to get separated from the others."

From the factory floor above there still came the periodic grinding thumps of the running machinery, reduced by distance and solid earth to a low muted snarl. Other noises filled the underground hallway; the rush of water through pipes, the mindless white roar of heavy-duty fans somewhere in the distance, and the staticky hum of an electrical room nearby. It was a steady symphony of industrial activity, varying just enough that Bruce wasn't sure at first when he began hearing the heavy puffing breathing and low growls that he associated with the Other Guy.

He slowed his pace, craning his neck around, but there was no place in this underground bunker that the Hulk could possibly hide. Was he imagining it? "Hey, guys," he said uncertainly, "do any of you hear that?"

"Hear what?" Tony asked him; but before he could elaborate Steve had stopped dead in the hallway ahead of them, one arm flung up as he turned his head to listen. His posture was rigid, his expression tense and excited as they all strained to hear it.

And then they did: faintly, from up ahead, a human voice calling _"Help! Help me!"_

"Someone's trapped down here," Steve said in a taut voice, and he broke into motion in a near-jog down the hallway. Not a dead run - that would have left his comrades in his wake, and broken all sense of formation - but enough that they all had to hustle to keep up.

A hundred yards ahead the hallway opened up into a sort of underground atrium, square pillars supporting the ceiling overhead while leaving the rest of the space open. Three of the walls were lined with lockers, many of them leaning on each other or fallen over at drunken angles. Most of them were open or stoved in, obviously empty, but halfway along the wall there was one that was upright and intact, pale metal door still firmly closed. It was from this locker that the voice was crying. _"Help me! Oh god, get me out of here! Help!"_

"Just hold on! Help is here," Steve called out, making his way over to the locker. He wrenched at the door, which rattled but failed to open.

"I can make short work of this flimsy metal," Thor suggested, swinging Mjolnir meaningfully, but Steve shook his head.

"No - we can't risk hurting whoever's inside," he said.

_"Is somebody out there?"_ the voice - male, Bruce thought, but he couldn't be sure. _"God, please! Please get me out of here!"_

"Want me to cut open the lock?" Tony offered. Clint and Natasha, without even needing to be told, had fallen into a guard position with their backs turned to Steve and the others, weapons raised as they covered the approaching hallway on either side.

Steve shook his head. "No, I think I can get it - just have to apply a little good old fashioned elbow grease -" He braced one foot on the wall behind the locker, wrapped both hands around the locker handle and pulled, tendons standing out along his neck and shoulder as he did.

The locker door banged open, sending Steve stumbling a pace backwards, and Bruce caught one sight of an amorphous, writhing shadow with glinting silver points inside the locker before it poured out through the opened door in a flood.

Steve and Tony were the closest - fortunately Tony was in his armor, and Steve's lightning-fast reflexes allowed him to put up his shield before any of the things could land on his face. They rushed out past Tony's armored boots, resolving from a dark mass to a horde of individual shapes - huge spiders, each one as large as a dinner plate, with glinting sharp points outlining all eight legs.

Thor shouted as a mass of them swarmed up his legs; behind him Bruce heard Clint yell, and there was a mess of static from Tony's vocalizer that Bruce was pretty sure was him screaming inside his helmet. Then Bruce had no more attention to spare for his teammates; his entire world had narrowed down to the primal horror, the instinctive _get away, get away_ as the wave of insects crested towards him.

Natasha's gun barked once, then twice, the noise loud in the sealed hallway despite the noise suppressors. The hiss of an arrow's flight was followed by a _whoosh_ of heated air and a bloom of light; one of Clint's special incendiary arrows. Thor's hammer rose and fell, crackling with lightning, but there were just too many targets, too small and too quick.

Bruce's back hit the wall, and he flinched away immediately - thick, sticky strands clung to his shoulders and hair. They resisted his pull, and he had to fight to free himself of their grasping embrace. A rustling noise over his head was his only warning before dozens of piercing legs ran over his shoulders and arms. He flinched violently away, shaking head head and arms ferociously and slapping at his shoulders and front.

Most of the insects tumbled off and went scuttling for cover with no further resistance, but one of them clung tenaciously to his bicep; Bruce let out a sharp gasp as pain pierced the skin of his upper arm, again and again. He couldn't seem to brush off his attacker, no matter how he tried; and he was afraid that if he tried to bang it against the wall, he would only disturb more of the things to rain down on him.

A streak of motion blurred past his peripheral vision, and the insect clinging to his arm was torn off in a final flare of pain. Bruce stumbled a few steps away, panting, then stopped and surveyed the room as he realized the commotion was mostly over.

"Jesus _fuck."_ Tony tottered forward, scratches and dings all over his armor, though it didn't look like anything had actually gotten through. "Next time I get in my workshop, I am totally going to install a flamethrower in my suit. A _hundred _flamethrowers."

"Agreed," Clint said, sounding shaky. "Some things just need to be killed by fire." He was favoring one leg, inspecting the wound in his side that had re-opened in the struggle. He was still on his still on his feet, so he couldn't be too badly off. Natasha went wordlessly to help him, ripping off strips of medical tape from her supply kits.

That left Bruce to take a closer look at the spider that had been pinned to the wall by Clint's arrow. It was still twitching feebly, so Bruce made sure to keep cautious inches away from it even as he leaned in close to examine it. For the most part it looked like any other spider - apart from the grotesque size - but the legs from the final tarsal joint on downwards didn't look like any insect Bruce had ever seen before. Instead of claws or feet, it had a set of glittering steel needles that ended in a hollow, slanted point. It wasn't _just_ that they were clearly inorganic material, grafted onto an organic being; Bruce had done enough medical work to know what a large-gage hypodermic needle looked like.

He pulled around his arm to inspect the outside of it. There was a rip in his shirt where some falling metal had torn through it upstairs, and a jagged gash in his flesh. Over the top of the cut, half a dozen neat and clinical puncture wounds were criss-crossed by thick black stitches, neatly suturing the wound closed. Bruce fingered the loose ends of the stitches where they stuck out of his skin, then gingerly touched the spiderwebs on the wall to confirm: they were thinner than string but thicker than thread, sticky and stiff as though waxed.

The spiders had swarmed over him but then scuttled off, except where he had been injured: there they'd sewn the wound up as neatly as any medical grad student could do.

"The beasts have been vanquished," Thor was saying as Bruce returned his attention to the rest of the room. "But what of the poor soul whose voice we heard?"

Steve turned pale, his face clammy as he swallowed. "You don't think -" he said, voice catching. "You don't think - he was trapped in there _with_ them...?"

The Avengers turned to the open locker, poking their way through the fried, crushed and dismembered spider corpses that coated the ground. Tony shone one of his suit's hand-lights into the locker; it was completely empty. There was no one there, no body or remains that could have indicated where a human being might have rested.

Natasha's lips set in a grim line. "It was a trap," she said. "There was a voice recording or a transmitted in there, to lure us in."

"Are you sure?" Steve worried, peering cautiously into the locker's interior. "I don't see a speaker..."

"You wouldn't, Cap," Clint said with a shake of his head. "Nowadays they can get 'em small enough to be invisible to the naked eye."

"Whoever set this trap knew we were coming," Natasha said. "Or at least, that _some_ rescue team would be coming - this was specifically set to draw in first responders."

"A reprehensible trick," Thor said, his face darkening. "Foul and cruel."

"Well, if they were trying to scare us off, it failed," Tony declared. He leaned forward, resting his weight on his hand against the edge of the locker in order to shout directly into the interior, into whatever transmitters might be hiding there. "You hear that? YOU FAILED! WE'RE GOING TO FIND YOU AND KICK YOUR ASS, YOU SON-OF-A -"

He broke off and recoiled backwards as another spider, this one half again larger than all the rest, launched itself out of the darkness and attached itself to his face. Thankfully he still had the faceplate down, but the insect clung tenaciously, stabbing its needle-like legs repeatedly against the polished metal seams. Tony stumbled backwards, metal hand clutching at his face, and for a moment Bruce was afraid he was going to do something stupid like fire his repulsor beam directly at himself in his panic. Fortunately Steve was there, grabbing Tony's shoulder with one hand to stabilize him while he used the edge of the shield to scrape off the unwanted parasite with the other.

Tony staggered free, two half-legs still swinging from the seams of his helmet where they'd been torn off the body. "_Motherfuck!"_ he shouted, and Bruce couldn't help but sympathize.

He cleared his throat, pulling everyone's attention back to him. "I think we should try to keep our voices down," he said.

"Listen, _you_ try keeping your voice down when there's a spider the size of a chihuahua trying to _eat your face -"_

"No, I mean, that's my point," Bruce said, and everyone looked at him strangely. "I think these things are attracted to loud noises. Like voices."

"Why do you say that?" Thor asked.

Bruce gestured at Natasha, and himself. "The spiders didn't go for either of us," he said. "The rest of you were shouting, and - and the spiders were attracted to that, but they mostly left us alone. But Natasha - and me - we didn't scream, and the spiders pretty much left us alone.."

"Hey, _I'm_ a professional," Clint objected. "_I_ sure as hell didn't scream."

"Like a little girl," Natasha told him dryly.

"And I think the speaker in that locker might have been why they were, uh, congregating in there," Bruce went on. "If it was just sitting there broadcasting, well - they might have been attracted to it, like moths to light. And they went for Tony, as soon as he raised his voice."

"You're right," Steve said, after a moment's thought. "Good observation, Bruce. And anyway, the closer we get to the center of the disturbance the more careful we have to be. We'll have to keep the noise down as much as possible from here on out."

He turned to face the others, expression seriously. "From now on, I want all comm chatter kept to a minimum," he said. "Tap each other's shoulder if you want to get our attention, and use gestures as much as possible. Yes, _Iron Man,_ that means you."

Heads nodded all around. Tony muttered something Bruce couldn't quite catch, but he didn't argue. Bruce got the feeling that the episode in with the locker had shaken him more than he wanted to admit.

They went on. Guided by the energy detector in Bruce's hand, they traveled the basement corridors in uneasy silence. The hallways opened up, became less maze-like and more open-plan; rusted metal tracks peeked out from under the layer of filth at their feet, and they all had to watch their step. Finally they came to an open underground bay, evenly spaced pillars marching away into the underground gloom. All the tracks converged at once on a broad wooden platform set with a square metal trapdoor. A heavy-grade winch and pulley system positioned over the trapdoor currently sat folded up and silent.

The far wall was lined with more of the tall, coffin-like metal lockers. And from the locker on the nearest end, a broken voice was pleading.

"Is anyone out there - anyone?" the voice called out, then broke into a haggard coughing fit that devolved into ragged gasps. "Please - please, anyone, I've been in here for days, I don't know how long..."

Bruce closed his eyes, and wished he could close his ears. Even knowing that it was a trap, that it was just bait, it gave him nearly a physical pain to hear the sounds of suffering so close and do _nothing._ Judging by their expressions, Thor and Clint felt it too; only Natasha appeared unmoved, or at least better at hiding it. Steve and Tony had taken to arguing in fierce whispers.

"Come on, Cap, don't be an idiot," Tony hissed. "It's a trap, you _know_ it's a trap. Haven't you ever heard the saying 'fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, get my suit thrown out of court for sheer incompetence?' "

"It _could_ be a trap," Steve argued stubbornly. "Or it could be someone who really needs help!"

"You know, there's an old saying," Bruce murmured softly. "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results."

"I know, right?" Tony said.

"I do not fear any foe that we might encounter," Thor declared, rather predictably. "Not any more of these insects, nor any other monster this dungeon could devise."

Clint shushed him nervously, but the thunder god was not particularly good at keeping his voice down. They all looked uneasily at the corners, where dark shapes scuttled. "Doesn't necessarily have to be a foe," Natasha pointed out. "Any kind of simple tripwire would do - jet of flame, sarin gas, poison dart. I say we don't go poking around in obvious traps."

"We can't just walk away!" Steve protested.

"Want me to demonstrate?" Clint whispered fiercely. "It's obviously set up to bait do-gooders like you. Well, we got burned once, and once was enough."

Steve set his jaw. "Or maybe the first one was a trap, intended to make us think that they're _all_ traps, so that we'll ignore all the subsequent ones which have _real_ people in need!"

They all paused to consider that for a moment. "That's pretty fucked up," Tony observed.

"Yeah, well, have you _seen_ this place?" Clint asked.

Bruce glanced over at Natasha, who met his eyes and shook her head, and they both looked back at Steve. "You're outnumbered, Samaritan," Tony said.

Steve took a breath and squared his shoulder. "This isn't a democracy vote," he said, voice all business now. "Not where civilian lives are at stake. I'm going to open it. You guys, keep back if you're worried."

"Oh, hell," Tony groaned. "I was afraid you'd say that. Fine, at least let me open it - I'm the one in full armor here."

"I've got the shield, I'll be fine," Cap protested, but Tony shook his head and strode forward, armor clanking slightly.

Natasha and Clint made no bones about removing themselves to a prudent distance - and anyway, they were both more efficient at a distance. Bruce joined them, well aware that he'd only be a liability, and Thor stood between them, gripping Mjolnir and watching like a hawk.

Tony used his suit's lasers to cut open the lock this time, and the entire team tensed unconsciously as the padlock dropped to the side with a heavy _thud._ Tony wrenched open the locker door, and the voice stopped.

It was completely empty. They all breathed an inaudible sigh of relief.

"See? No civilians," Clint said to Steve. "Told you so."

"But why set up the bait and no trap?" Natasha muttered, brow furrowing in perplexity. Bruce could only shrug.

Steve shook his head, leaning forward to examine the locked floor. "There's something here," he exclaimed, and reached down to scuffle in the wet mold of the locker floor.

"Don't get tetanus," Tony advised him.

Steve sat back on his heels, gloved fingers sifting through a handful of muck. A glint of metal shone in the weak fluorescent lights. "It's a key," he said. He turned it over, searching for some kind of identifier. "No idea for what, though."

"Could be for an engine, or any of the storage cages down here," Tony said. "There's no time to try them all to find out."

"Does it matter?" Thor asked. "We have no need for such things. There are no doors or locks that can stand against us; Mjolnir is all the key that we will ever need!"

"You never know," Steve said. He stood up and carefully tucked it away in one of his pockets, that he then buttoned shut. "All right, we've spent enough time on this. Let's get moving."

The metal trapdoor was not locked, but it was (unsurprisingly) crusted shut. It took Steve and Thor together, working one at each corner, to crack it loose and lever the trapdoor out of the way. It slid aside with a bone-jarring squeal, revealing a square patch of darkness below. A wave of hot, dry air rolled up through the hatch and hit them, smelling of ashes and acrid smoke, and a little bit like a barbeque.

"That's coal smoke," Clint said, and the others nodded. It had to be coming from the fire burning in the coal seams below, which meant that this tunnel gave access directly into the mines.

And somewhere down there lay their destination.

"Let's go," Steve said, adjusting his cowl; with his shield strapped onto his back, he put an arm around the winching cable and dropped into the darkness.

* * *

><p>~to be continued...<p> 


	5. fear of snakes (ævidophobia)

**ævidophobia**

(fear of snakes)

* * *

><p>Clint had been on worse missions than this. He could say that one up front with very little hesitation. The winter surveillance mission he'd had in Wales probably took the prize for the longest time spent in the most miserable conditions, lurking out in the freezing rain for months on end with shitty accommodations and even shittier food was all that had been available (and coming from a former circus boy, you <em>knew<em> that was bad). The mutiny in Vientiane had undoubtedly been the ugliest, in terms of betrayal and in-fighting and a friend's blood on his hands, whereas the Juarez extraction held the record for the highest sheer number of bullets flung in his direction in the space of a single hour.

And the less said about Budapest, the better.

So no, this wasn't the worst spot Clint had ever found himself in. But 'not the worst' still didn't translate to 'fun and lollipops,' and Clint _hated_ working underground. He was more of a heights sort of guy; he liked long lines of open sight and free air. Down here hemmed in by tons of solid stone and _fucking walls_ every hundred feet, he couldn't see a damn thing and he couldn't shoot worth shit.

The light down here was crap, too, and that wasn't helping matters much. They were out of the sub-basements and into tunnels carved into the earth itself, and mine tunnels didn't come with handy electric wiring. The only illumination down here was irregularly spaced halogen lamps stuck into the dirt floor or hung on a beam, many of them waning as their battery life ran down. They had brought their own light sources with them, so they wouldn't be in the dark even if the lights gave out entirely, but Clint still hated the thought of being shut up down here in the dark. Like a tomb.

Of course, there wasn't really much down here worth seeing. Dirt walls held up by beams, trampled earthen floor with gleaming metal rails embedded in the passageway. Every now and again they'd pass an overturned mine cart, sometimes spilling a load of rubble or ore onto the passageway floor. Here and there would be a square wooden platform or a skeleton of wooden tracks, trampled into the dirt and with water oozing up through the cracks.

With visibility so bad Clint was forced to fall back on his other senses, but they didn't offer a much better picture. The acoustics down here were confusing as hell; sounds echoed between one passageway and the next until it was impossible to tell where they were coming from. The air alternated between hot and dry and wet and cold, with whiffs of burning sulfur and superheated metal alternating with the rancid stench of decay.

The quiet was oppressive; since Steve's gag order in the basement all of the easy team chatter over the comm had gone silent. Clint was usually the first to bitch about Tony's incessant running commentary, but the plain fact was that he had a way of lightening the mood that no one else could match. Without him making cynical cracks and witty observations on everything they passed, the dark and oppressive atmosphere weighed down on them like a blanket.

Every step Clint took throbbed like fire up his torn leg; their first aid kit had managed to staunch the bleeding, but that didn't make it any fun to walk on. He wouldn't complain - he'd had worse - but it wasn't making it any better that for all the walking they'd been doing they weren't _getting_ anywhere. These tunnels just went in fucking circles, and the vague dizzy lightheadedness from the blood he'd lost didn't help any in keeping his sense of direction.

The utility corridors under the refinery at least had been laid out in a vaguely gridlike pattern, with some assurance that a hallway that went in a certain direction would actually continue in that direction. The mine tunnels twisted like nesting snakes, curving around and intersecting with each other at completely random intervals. They knew from Bruce's handy little magic detector that the source of the disturbance was somewhere ahead of them _and below,_ (and wasn't that the most disturbing line he'd gotten in a mission brief since 'assume all civilians complicit,') but there didn't seem to be any easy way to get where they were going. Once they'd taken a tunnel that seemed to be going in the right direction, and it did - until they suddenly found themselves on the other side of a wide chasm from the rest of the tunnel. If there had once been a bridge spanning that gap, it was long gone, and the Avengers had been forced to retrace their steps. All the backtracking and turning around was disorienting, and Clint knew he wasn't the only member of the team who was getting frustrated.

"This is ridiculous," he griped, as they came out of yet another curving tunnel to find themselves in yet the same open bay they had crossed through three times now. "We're getting nowhere!"

Steve sent him a reproving glance for the outburst, then turned to Tony. "Any luck mapping these tunnels, Iron Man?"

"The ones we've actually been to, yes; the rest of them, no," Tony replied curtly. "My sensors are good, but even they can't map a tunnel through two meters of solid earth and rock. I think we're stuck with trial and error."

"That could take days," Natasha said quietly. "This place is huge. And Banner's device is no help."

"You got a better idea?" Tony retorted, obviously stung on Bruce's behalf. "Oh wait, no you _don't,_ because you're not a science _genius."_

"Hey, jackass, don't take out your incompetence on her," Clint started, equally moved to Natasha's defense; nothing she'd said wasn't true. Bruce's magic detector swung lazily and vaguely around, pointing in a different direction no matter where they turned it, but always _down._

"Cut it, you two," Steve said sharply. They both transfer their glares to him, but he glared back with equal strength and made a throat-slicing motion.

A flicker of movement caught the corner of Clint's eye and he snapped his head around, bow coming up to cover the angle. Shadows and light flickered and writhed, and it took Clint a moment to parse what he'd seen. A hollow in the rock, a little natural niche that branched off the main tunnel - to small for humans to bother with, but the right size for burrowing animals. The movement flickered again, and Clint picked out the bright beady eyes and naked tails of rats. He relaxed his bowstring a fraction; he'd seen enough rats in his life not to be scared of them.

But there was something off about them. They writhed on the ground with a motion that was all _wrong_ for rodents. They wallowed forward on their bellies, hairless tails lashing in the dust and gravel as they struggled to get away from the hot whipping wind of the fire, and Clint realized what it was that was wrong with them; each and every one of the rats had no legs.

Thor had gone ahead while the rest of them conferred, and now he waved at them from the mouth of a tunnel. "We have not yet tried this route, my friends," he called out. "It may start out leading upwards, but I do believe it drops further on." One of the creepy black spiders spun its way out of the shadows in response to his booming voice, hurrying down on a long black line, and Thor casually swatted it away with Mjolnir. Steve had given up trying to enforce the order to be quiet on him, and as long as he was able to deal with the trouble it drew, that was his own problem.

To get to the mouth of the tunnel Thor had found they had to climb up a rickety bridge of cart rails, with the supporting embankments crumbling under their footsteps. There were dirt falls all over the place in the tunnels, most likely dislodged by the recent earth tremors. As Clint climbed up the slope he sometimes thought he could feel the earth quivering underneath him, yet another unspoken menace that pressed in all around them.

As Thor had promised, the ground did begin to slope downwards once more after a few hundred yards. The lights up here were even worse than they had been in the wide bay below, and even Clint's dark-adapted eyes strained against the shadows. A glint of light from up ahead caught his eye, and he alerted the others to it with a low whistle.

"I'll check it out," Steve decided, and gestured to Clint. "Hawkeye, you cover me. The rest of you, keep an eye out and come if there's trouble."

There was a pale figure huddling by one of the dark glistening pools in the ground. As they got closer, Clint saw it was a woman, or perhaps a girl; it was hard to tell her age from here. Her hair and clothes were plastered flat against her skin, soaking wet like she'd been swimming. Maybe she had - if she was fleeing from the fire she might had jumped into the water to try to escape it. People did stupider things in a panic.

The sound of her sobs became clearer as they approached, the woman rocking back and forth in her huddle. Steve, do-gooder that he was, couldn't resist going to her.

"Miss, are you all right?" he called out as he approached. Clint stayed back, hand tensed on his bowstring; the episode with the lockers had made him wary. Clint would have thought they'd have made Steve wary too, but then again this was a man who voluntarily busted open a second one of the things just on the _chance_ that there might be a civilian in there. "We're here to help."

The woman looked up, and uncurling slightly from her protective huddle began to move towards them. She didn't stand up, and Clint noticed that there seemed to be something wrong with her legs; they didn't quite move right with the rest of her. Broken, maybe? "Please help me," she managed to say from between her sobs. "Please, please..."

"It's all right. You're going to be all right," Steve said reassuringly, drawing close and bending down towards her. He reached out a hand and she grabbed onto it with both of her own, pulling herself towards him so she could cling to his chest.

"Help me, help me," she whimpered. "Please, save me..."

"Miss, it's going to be all right now," Steve reassured her. He tried to push her away, gently so as not to frighten her further, but she clung to him stubbornly. "Let go, just relax and we'll find a way to get you out of here. Let go..."

But she didn't let go.

Even as Steve began to put real force behind his efforts to dislodge her, the girl's grip on him only tightened. She got one arm around his chest and squeezed tight, and Steve's attempts to remove her became slightly more urgent. "Miss, please, you have to let go," he said, voice slightly strangled. "We're going to help you, I promise, but you have to let go now -"

"Save me," she whimpered, and her arms crawled around his chest and torso - impossibly long arms, jointed in too many places. _"Save me."_

Clint cursed and strode forward. "Steve, get away from her," he shouted. "She's one of them!"

_"Trying," _Steve wheezed, one arm up by his chest as he tried fruitlessly to pry himself from her grip. The wrongness of her body, of her legs, was becoming hideously clear - her legs were joined together, fused like some primal mermaid. Her arms were too long and their strength was inhuman; Steve was choking now from the force of the grip she had around his chest.

Clint reached out to grab her shoulder, to yank her away - but instead of closing on firm flesh, his fingers sank through what felt like wet pulp to meet something cold and hard underneath. His hand slipped and skidded on her shoulder, and her skin pulled away from the flesh underneath it, raw and red and glistening. Clint scrabbled for a better grip, his hand clamping down on the slick flesh under the skin. It felt oddly smooth and hard, more like scales than meat, and cold for one moment before it was suddenly, blisteringly hot.

He realized the trap a second later when the pain hit him, a sharp burning accompanied with a dangerous tingling like he'd just plunged his hand into pure alkaline. He snatched his hand away with a yell, unable to contain the noise despite the danger; but it was too late, the poison was on his skin now, and he clutched his wrist as though that could stop it from spreading up his arm as he looked around desperately for some way to quench the fire.

The pool of black liquid glistened, promising cool relief, but Clint refused to let the pain override his better judgment. There was no guarantee that that was _water,_ and even if it was, it had to be absolutely full of filth and pollutants. The last thing Clint wanted was for his shooting hand to go septic - and so he ignored his instincts and plunged his burning hand down on a pile of loose dirt instead, smothering the pain like he would a fire.

It was long agonizing heartbeats before the scalding feeling began to abate; his hand still hurt like a motherfucker, but at least it wasn't getting any _worse._ For the first time Clint was able to look up from his own injury to see what was happening to Steve.

Tony and Thor taken over trying to pry the..._ thing_ off of Steve; Tony's hands were protected by his armor and Thor, who the hell knew. Bullets bounced off his skin, so a little acid probably didn't faze him. But even with all their strength, they weren't able to loosen the limpet-like grip locked around Steve's chest and stomach.

Even with his super-soldier enhancements Steve was choking and wheezing for breath under the pressure of her grip, and black water splashed around his boots as he staggered. She wailed piteously and clung even harder to Steve, burrowing her face against his chest. "Save me," she sobbed, even as she continued to slowly crush him to death. One rib snapped, with a sound not unlike popcorn popping, and then a second as Steve grunted in agony. "_Love_ me."

Steve stumbled again, the water sloshing higher around his calves as he fought for footing, and Clint realized with a jolt of horror that the movement was not accidental - she was trying to drag him down into the water, which would finish him off if her constricting grip didn't. It shouldn't have been possible for one slender body to conceal that much inhuman strength, that she could resist the combined strength of three supernaturally enhanced Avengers - but she was doing it.

At least until Natasha appeared from the shadows, put the barrel of her gun against the girl's head, and fired.

She'd chosen her angle well; the dark red spray of blood and skull fragments all went against the wall, and no more than a few drops splattered on Steve. The body went limp, flopping like a landed fish, and Steve gasped and inhaled a huge breath as the pressure eased. With Thor's help he peeled his way out of her constricting embrace, and threw the body onto the dirt.

She didn't look so threatening now, lying skinny and limp on the ground, and the sight of her left Steve distraught. "You _killed_ her," he gasped, looking up at Natasha accusingly.

Natasha looked back at him impassively. "She was trying to kill _you,"_ she said, as though it should have been obvious. Which really, it should have been, to anyone less unflinchingly good-hearted than Captain America.

"She was crying out for our _help!" _Steve objected strenuously. "She needed..."

Natasha cut him off with an impatient scoff. "Is that what you think?" she demanded. Suddenly, all in a moment her entire demeanor changed. Gone was the cold, no-nonsense business attitude. Instead her eyes opened wide, her lips trembled, and her arms huddled in front of her as though trying to keep warm. Tears welled up in her green eyes, streaking down her cheeks. "Please, don't hurt me," she said in a quavering voice, and despite knowing damn well it was an act, not one of the men staring at her could possibly be unaffected. "I'll do anything, I swear, just let me go!"

She dropped the act as quickly as it had started, and stared at them with her cold, marble expression, heedless of the tears that streaked her cheeks. "It's the oldest trick in the book, to lure in a mark," she said calmly.

The rest of the team continued to argue in heated whispers, but Clint ignored them as he carefully approached the body. He wanted to get a good look at it just in case there were more of them out there somewhere. He toed it carefully with his boot, rolling the body out on its back, and crouched down beside it. Nobody looked good with half of their skull blown out the side, but Clint had seen worse.

He'd been right about the thing's legs; they weren't right at all. They seemed to be fused together, tailing off at the ankle to a pale grotesque kind of flipper where the feet should have been. The arms were long and had too many joints to them, but the torso from the waist up and the head looked almost human, with the sharp outline of ribs and collarbones protruding from the flesh. The outer layer of skin was fragile and sloughed away easily, as Clint had discovered to his detriment - the marks of his teammate's hands had scored long furrows into the skin, revealing the raw poisonous flesh beneath. Still, there was one patch of skin on her upper arm that was unscathed - but not unmarked, and Clint nudged it carefully until the limb turned into the light.

Clint stared.

"We're in enemy territory here, Captain," Natasha said; her voice was flat and furious. "We've tripped two traps already. We can't afford to risk tripping any more if you keep rushing off on self-appointed missions to save civilians who aren't even there!"

"But none of this makes any sense, damn it!" Steve burst out, his voice rising as the heat of his frustration rose over his self-imposed injunction against noise. "What _happened_ to this place? Where did all these monsters come from, anyway? And where did all the townspeople _go?!"_

"Uh, guys?" Clint spoke up, his own voice raw and hoarse. His voice had a funny sound to it that drew the others out of their quarrel, and he kept staring at the body before his feet even as the others all turned to look at him. "I think... I think these _are_ the townspeople."

Because no matter how Clint thought about it, he couldn't think of any good reason for a lab-grown hellbeast to have a Rihanna tattoo.

_"What?"_ They all stared at him in shocked disbelief. Clint had to swallow carefully and take a shallow breath before he could answer.

"Think about it," he said. "None of the townspeople got out when the communications went dead. That means they must still be in here somewhere... but we haven't found any bodies." Except for the bodies of the ones _they _had killed.

"This cannot be," Thor said. "What sorcery could do this?"

"That's - no. That's impossible," Tony stated firmly. Clint wasn't sure who he was trying to convince, them or himself. "Even if there was some way - even if something could turn normal human beings into - into _monsters_ like this, there's no way it could have - not in just a few days, it couldn't have -"

"Nothing about this town has been possible," Bruce said softly, his voice cutting through Tony's fragmented arguments. "And yet, here we are. Can we even trust our own senses in a place like this? Are we sure that the things we're seeing are even the things that are really there?"

"But - " Steve looked like his world was crashing down around his ears, his expression full of devastated heartbreak. "But that means -"

"That means we've been killing the people that we were sent here to save," Clint finished for him, quietly. Killing them by the dozens, painting the streets with their blood and entrails, and they'd _laughed_ while they'd done it.

His stomach twisted sharply under his breast, and for a moment Clint was sure he was going to be sick. He wasn't a stranger to this horror, he had seen civilians fall in the line of duty before - but never like this. Never by his own hand, with such callous indifference. Who exactly were the _monsters_ in this town?

Natasha drew in a long and shaky breath, but when she spoke again her voice was iron-controlled. "This changes nothing," she said.

"What the hell?" Tony rounded on her, furious. "This changes _everything -"_

"It doesn't," she said sharply. "Whatever happened to these people, we don't have the power to undo it. Our mission is still the same. We've got to get to the center of whatever is causing this and dismantle it. That's our top priority."

"Mayhap once the villain is dead, and his spell broken, all the townsfolk will return to normal?" Thor suggested, his voice hopeful.

Nobody quite was willing to meet his eyes. Nobody wanted to tell him that ontological inertia just didn't work that way - that once a thing was changed it was changed forever, even if the person who did it was gone. "Maybe, Thor," Bruce said softly. "Maybe."

They went on. Thor's passage seemed to be the right one - at least it took them to a whole new set of tunnels, instead of the same ones looping back over themselves again and again. They were moving more-or-less steadily to the northwest, now, and while that felt like progress - Clint thought - it also brought them closer to the source of the coal seam fires. The air around them was getting hotter, dry wind rushing past them like air drawn out of a chimney. Clint couldn't help but be aware of the coal dust coating the ground beneath their feet, the jumbled piles of rock and ore spilling out of overturned mine carts that littered their path. One spark, that was all it would take, and these caves could become an inferno.

The ground trembled constantly, now, a faint vibration that sent tiny grains of dust trickling down the walls like water. Clint couldn't help but calculate their odds if the tunnel collapsed on them. Tony would survive, protected by his armor - although whether he'd be able to dig himself out again after was the question. Steve's shield might protect him from the immediate threat of falling rocks, but he'd likely be crushed if the whole tunnel caved in. Thor, who the hell knew, really. It was hard to tell how much of his blithe disregard of danger was simple confidence in his own invulnerability, and how much was just arrogance. They hadn't yet run up against the edges of the former, although they might today.

But himself, Natasha and Bruce? They were toast and they knew it. They always knew it, being the most human members of the team and thus the most vulnerable, but it was harder to ignore down here with death pressing in from every direction. What the hell was he even doing here? What good was a sniper, down at the bottom of a coal mine? Had he been brought along just to make up the numbers, or as a mascot?

Yeah, Clint had been on worse ops before. But this one was getting dangerously near the top of the list.

The tunnel they'd been following ran sharply downhill before opening out into another oval-shaped bay. A few small tunnels branched off sharply from the sides, and the tracks led out the far end of the cavern where it narrowed back down before leading off into the gloom. That seemed the most likely route, as far as any of them could tell, according to Bruce's magic compass.

There was just one problem - the cavern wasn't empty. Water had collected in a wide shallow pool down by the far end, and another one of the soaked-looking girls sat by the edge of the far tunnel, weeping. She didn't move or react when they came in, but there would be no way to get out of the cavern without passing within her reach.

Steve and Natasha, unsurprisingly, immediately fell into a heated whispered argument. "There's got to be some way to talk to her," Steve insisted. "If she _is_ one of the townsfolk -"

"We can't take the risk," Natasha said sharply. "We know just what she's capable of, and we know that she's _not_ capable of reason."

"We've already killed too many -"

"And we'll try to keep the casualties down from now on." Natasha shook her head. "We won't seek out any fights we can avoid. But _this_ one is directly in our way."

"We could backtrack, try to find another way around," Bruce suggested diffidently.

"And how much time would we waste doing that? How many lives do we lose with each minute that ticks away?"

A humanoid figure moved in the corner of Clint's peripheral vision, stepping out of the shadows from one of the side tunnels, and Clint immediately whirled to face the new threat. He instinctively moved to attack, aborting the movement only when his burned hand screamed in agony as he tried to draw the bow-string.

The stranger that stepped out of the shadows was no more than a child - eight or nine if he'd been fed normally, eleven or twelve if he'd lived a hard life. Either way he was bony and scrawny, and there was a wildness around his eyes that reminded Clint a little uneasily of how Barney had looked at that age. He certainly didn't _look_ like a threat, but then neither had the snake-girls, until they got their prey in grabbing distance.

"Stay back," Clint warned the kid, his voice hard and suspicious. "Who are you? Where'd you come from?"

The kid looked at him, face pale, eyes wide and scared. "He's coming," he gasped. Looking closer, Clint realized he was shaking all over, but he still refused to drop his guard. "You've got to run!"

"Who's coming?" Clint demanded. The hair on the back of his neck was beginning to stand up. "We're not running anywhere."

"You've _got_ to!" the kid said, his voice shrill. "You can't fight him. Nobody can. You've got to _run!"_

"I asked you before, _who _-" Clint started impatiently. A sudden movement to his left distracted him, his head snapping around to track the movement; when he looked back, the little boy was gone.

By this point, Clint wasn't even fucking surprised.

The argument had escalated while Steve was distracted; they weren't even trying to keep their voices down. Thor had chimed in on Steve's side, his chivalrous nature stoutly opposed to killing a woman or even something that looked like one if there was any possible alternative. Tony, for once, was actually supporting Natasha; for all his hotdogging and bullshit, Tony could be ruthlessly practical when the need called for it. "There's way too much at stake for us to be playing games right now, Cap," Tony insisted.

"She's just a girl, an innocent!" Steve said vehemently. "She never asked for any of this! And now you want to reward her with death?"

"Death would be a mercy, compared to living on as an abomination!" Natasha snapped. "Whatever she once _was,_ she's a monster now! Do you think she would have wanted to keep on living this way?"

"We don't know _what_ she would have wanted -"

"Wait," Clint said suddenly, throwing up an elbow. The argument stuttered to a halt, at least temporarily. "Do you guys hear that?"

"Hear what?" Natasha asked.

"The crying? It's just a trick, I know," Steve said, a bit impatiently.

"The fire?" Tony asked. "I've been hearing it; as far as I know it hasn't moved."

"No," Clint said, turning his head and listening hard. His ears weren't as good as his eyes, he knew, and there were so many conflicting sounds - the breathing and scuffling of his teammates, the hypnotic sobs of the monster, the distant roar of the fire, the rumbling of the earth. It was hard to sort out just what out of the symphony of danger had put him on edge. "Pipe down a minute. Listen."

Somewhat to his surprise, they did; hell, they even stopped breathing for a moment, or at least the noisy ones did. For a moment Clint thought the thumping of his own heart would drown out everything else, and then he heard it:

_Scrape._

"There," Clint said, releasing his breath in a rush. It was easier to focus on it now that he'd identified it, picking it out of the background. _Scrape, scrape,_ like metal being dragged over earth. "Hear that?"

"Aye, I hear it," Thor responded. "But I know not what it is."

"Me neither," Clint muttered uneasily. _Scrape, scrape._ "But I think it's coming our way -"

The next moment, the tunnels were blasted by an enraged, echoing howl. It was a sound full of bloodlust and raked with torment, wordlessly promising to inflict tenfold vengeance upon all those that had wronged it. It woke a primeval terror in the back of each of their brains, leaving them quaking in their boots until it passed over, echoing away down the halls away from them.

It was a howl they all knew well.

They looked at Bruce, whose face had gone pale, almost livid with a cold sweat that had broken out on his skin. "It's not me," he denied. "I don't know where he is, or _how..._ but it's not me. He's not in here."

The earth shuddered beneath their feet - but not the generalized, subtle tremors of before. Instead this was as though something had struck the ground above them, with such force that it threatened to cave in the roof above their head.

"Should we not try to find him?" Thor suggested. "However he became separated from Banner, the Hulk is still our friend and companion. If he is in some pain or trouble, might we not free him and add his forces to our own?"

"You don't understand!" Bruce said, more forcefully than Clint had ever heard him speak before. "Wherever he is, _I'm not in there._ I can't feel him, I don't know what he's thinking at all. There's no _me_ in there to control him, or to tell him who's friend and who's foe. If any of you get within reach of him, he's going to kill you!"

The light from the oncoming tunnel went dark.

At first Clint thought that the camp lights in the tunnel ahead had finally given out. But the darkness moved, the darkness _breathed,_ and in the grunting and shuffling noises Clint realized the truth: the tunnel had been filled so thoroughly it was blocking all light from beyond.

The earth shuddered again, dirt and stone crumbling down from the roof of the tunnel as something too large forced its way through. The _scraping_ of metal over rock turned to the teeth-grinding noise of earth being rent open, growing louder and then quieter but never ceasing.

It was the Hulk. They had all known it, from the moment they heard his howl, they knew it was no one else it could be. However little they understood what was happening here, how he had come to be separate from his host in Bruce Banner, they all knew it was the Hulk in the tunnel beyond.

But what had been done to him -

The Hulk that the Avengers had known had the shape of a man, walked on two legs like a man. But this Hulk crept along on all fours like a beast, his arms jutting unnaturally to the side, his head hanging so low that his chin nearly brushed the ground. His spine was bent sharply over at an agonizing angle, the mountainous muscles of his back and neck and shoulders quivering with the strain; a nearly featureless hill of bulging flesh.

The reason for his strange posture, Clint saw as he emerged into the light, was a massive iron collar that had been fastened around his neck. A very short length of fat links of chain had been attached to a massive anchor that was embedded in the ground, dragging his face nearly into the dirt. A choke-chain, Clint realized, lined with razor-jagged spikes. As he moved, he dragged the anchor along in the ground like a plow, too massive for even the mighty Hulk to raise his head. Yet even this encumbrance could not stop him - slow him, maybe, but the unstoppable might of the Hulk dragged forwards even against this mighty weight.

The collar was not the only binding upon him, Clint saw as he heaved more of his bulk out of the tunnel. There were similar shackles upon his wrists, his ankles, and around his waist. But they didn't stop there; chains issued from what seemed like every square foot of his chest and arms and back, each one attached to an bolt embedded in the ground. As usual, the Hulk wore no shirt nor garment, and it took Clint a moment to realize that the chains were each attached to his flesh by a wicked curved meat hook threaded through his skin and piercing the flesh below.

Every time he moved, the hooks dragged along his skin, pulling back the skin to reveal the gaping wounds below. The collar, the cuffs were all studded with long and vicious spikes, turned inwards, that bit savagely into his flesh with every shift and breath. Dark green blood streamed out from every inch of him, staining and pooling the ground below him but still the Hulk would not stop, he would not be stayed. The chains could slow him, but they _could not stop him,_ and the torment inflicted on him with every cruel point only fueled the madness of his rage.

And as he raised his head the few inches the chains allowed to him, his blood-maddened eyes fixed on them, and he let out another bestial, agonized scream.

"Oh god," someone said in a faint voice, and Clint wasn't even sure who. "Oh God. Who did this to him? Who could have done something like this..."

Whatever outrage or pity Clint felt for the torment his teammate was in, however, had to take a back seat to the immediate danger they were all in. The Hulk was volatile, dangerous at the best of times, when he was loosed in the midst of battle with Banner riding herd on his subconscious. Now he was running berserk, driven insane by the pain the hooks inflicted on him, and there were no other enemies in sight on which to vent his bloodrage. "Guys," Clint said, and he could not stop or hide the chattering of his own jaw. "We have to get the fuck out of here, _right now."_

The snake-girl who had been sitting curled up by the opposite tunnel, rocking herself and crying, uncoiled when the Hulk came creaking and straining near her pool. "Save me," she wailed, and they could hear her voice even over the grunting and growling of the Hulk. "Love me, love me, _love me -"_

She grabbed onto the Hulk's massive, tree-trunk arm, her long prehensile arms barely able to wrap around his wrist. The Hulk snarled in disgust, hauling his arm off the ground with obvious effort, blood running down his hand and fingers as he strained against the chains. Then with a single, brutal movement he smashed his fist against the stone floor.

The girl's wails were instantly silenced. Blood and less savory things ran out from under his hand; when he lifted it again, in preparation for another dragging step forward, there was nothing left on the stone but a dark smear.

"Retreat," Steve said in a tense voice that left no room for argument. "This isn't the fight we came here for. He's not moving very fast - we'll circle around -"

Natasha turned immediately to obey, stepping swiftly towards the tunnel behind them in what was not quite a run. Clint scrambled to follow her, and he heard Bruce coming after him with Tony's clanking armor close behind. No doubt Cap and Thor had stayed to cover the rear.

The tunnel was dark and Clint had only gotten past the first bend before he blundered into Natasha's black-clad figure in the dark. "Nat?" he asked anxiously. "Why'd you stop?"

"We can't go back this way," Natasha said, her voice weirdly flat. "The fire's spread. It's moved into the tunnel behind us. We can't go back."

"Fuck!" Clint surged past her into the tunnel, but as soon as he turned the first corner he felt it - a wall of heat that hit him like a physical blow, searing his eyes dry and blistering painfully in his mouth and lungs. He reeled backwards, buffeted by smoke and the periodic washes of burning heat as the flames raged and danced before them. He'd only gotten a glimpse, but that was enough - ugly orange flames consumed the whole gallery ahead of them. There would be no getting out this way unless the fire passed - and the only place it had to go was through them.

"You have got to be kidding me!" Clint burst out. "Does God have it out for us today or what?"

"It's not _God,_" Natasha snapped back. "It's this place. It _hates_ us. It has ever since we stepped foot in this town. Can't you feel it?"

"It's a goddamn _town,_ Natasha, it doesn't think or feel," Clint protested, but it was half-hearted. He knew exactly what she meant, knew the waves of malice and hatred that had rolled off the streets and pressed down on them harder with every step they took. He had ignored it, as much as possible at least, dismissing it as the product of nerves and the human tendency to anthropomorphize - but -

"All right," Steve's voice called them from the mouth of the tunnel. Clint pushed away from the mouth of the tunnel, staggering back towards the cooler air of the cavern. The Avengers were all lined up at the mouth of the tunnel, weapons out and tensed, ready for action. "I need solutions, people, not panic."

"I could try and cut through the ceiling," Tony suggested, speaking rapidly. "Or possibly carve out another exit tunnel through one of these walls -"

"And bring the whole place down on our heads?" Clint demanded.

"Those small tunnels can't accommodate him," Natasha said, and he could hardly tell from the rigid control of her voice how frightened she was. "We could scatter into those, wait for him to go away."

Steve's brow pinched. "They're too small to accommodate more than one or two of us, either," he said. "We'd have to split up. I'll keep that as a last resort, but I don't want to send anyone off alone if we can avoid it." He glanced at Clint, then away, and Clint swallowed against the tightness around his throat. Maybe the others could play dodgeball with the Hulk, but with this leg wound Clint wasn't going to be running anywhere very fast, and they both knew it.

"I will fight him, my friends," Thor said, stepping forward and beginning to twirl Mjolnir, building up momentum. "Our friend and I have sparred many a time in the past; perhaps the memory of it will bring him to his senses."

"That's not happening," Clint said flatly. "Not while those _things_ are on him. He's _not_ going to calm down when every movement just hurts him more -"

"And the angrier he gets, the stronger he gets," Bruce finished.

Through the whole conversation the Hulk had not stopped his slow, agonizing progress; he came across the cavern towards them like a steamroller, gradual but inevitable.

"We have no choice, it seems," Thor said simply. "We cannot retreat, and he will not. A fight is inevitable; it is better that we have it on his own terms." He stepped forward again, his weapon held out, and approached the Hulk with a resolute expression.

"Thor, _no,"_ Bruce yelled, but the Asgardian ignored them; he leapt into battle with a blood-curdling warcry, Mjolnir held high.

Clint had seen Thor quite literally bat away a falling building with a swing of that hammer; but when it connected with the Hulk's head, all it did was snap it to the side, jerking violently against the restraint of the leash and collar. The Hulk turned his head back again, his massive features twisting into an ugly scowl, and met Thor's battlecry with a bellow that seemed like it would shake down the ceiling.

Thor, undeterred, brought his hammer back for another blow. But before he got a chance to swing it, almost faster than the eye could follow, the Hulk's massive hand snapped forward to seize him about the chest. The fingers of that hand were still pulped with the bloody remains of the monster he had killed, and blood oozed out from between his fingers as he squeezed.

Even Thor's mighty physique could not stand up to such pressure, and he let out a short cry of agony as he swung Mjolnir again and again, trying to break those massive fingers without success.

"Avengers, attack!" Steve yelled, and that snapped Clint out of his horror. However little a chance they had, they couldn't just sit there and watch their friend be killed, only for the monster to move on to them when he was finished.

They threw themselves into battle, though none of them were foolish enough (or brave enough) to put themselves in range of the Hulk's grip as Thor had. Natasha fired from the cover of the wall, targeting the spots most likely to be vulnerable: the eyes, the temples, the throat. None of her bullets made an impact. Tony opened up with his repulsors, emptied his magazines of bullets, without much better effect. Lightning flashed from the head of Thor's hammer, striking in a dozen places, but though they left singe marks on the Hulk's hide he barely shuddered from it. Steve threw his shield like a discus, aiming for the tendons of the Hulk's wrist. The Hulk grunted in pain as the shield ricocheted, but did not loosen his grip.

Clint gritted his teeth against the agony of his burned hand as he drew back his bow to let loose. Despite his best efforts to keep the pain under tightly disciplined control, his movements were stiff and clumsy and the last two fingers of his hand weren't responding to him at all. God, he hoped the acid hadn't gotten far enough under the skin to do tissue damage. Even with the best medical treatment SHIELD could buy, you could never fully restore 100% functionality to damaged ligaments. Worst case scenario, even if Clint got out of here he might never draw a bow again.

Well, no. Worst case scenario, he died down here in the mud and his friends died with him.

He fitted an arrow with one of his special heads, a bull-elephant strength tranquilizer that he'd added to his arsenal when the first reports of the Hulk started filtering back to them. He'd never had a chance to test it, and he prayed like crazy as he lined up his shot and let loose. The arrow sank into one of the throbbing veins in the Hulk's elbow; the shaft broke off with his next violent shudder, but the head stayed embedded.

The Hulk grunted, his movements turning sluggish, his head nodding forward, and Clint felt a surge of electric hope thrilling in his veins. _Yes - !_

_No._ Even as the Hulk began to slump, the cruel spikes and chains that dug into his flesh at a hundred points drew blood, and he surged back up with an infuriated howl. He surged forward, muscles straining at the chains that fastened him to the ground; several of them snapped, their broken links swinging loosely, as he took one ground-shaking step forward, then another.

As Clint watched, horrified and transfixed, the chains shook themselves like living things and slithered once more towards the ground, re-establishing the connection. The Hulk slowed once more to a crawl, but he was more than halfway across the cavern by now, and their attacks were barely even slowing him down.

The Avengers were backed up further and further against the wall as death came slowly but inexorably towards them. "On my mark," Steve rapped out, readying his shield grimly. "Scatter into those side tunnels."

"It's too late!" Natasha said, her voice shaking. "He's too close - we can't get by him -"

"He can't grab all of us at once," Steve said simply. "And I'll try to make sure his attention stays focused front."

He stepped forward, and Clint realized what he was about to do - make a sacrifice play, throw himself onto the Hulk to provide a distraction while the rest of them scattered. A protest hovered on his tongue but Clint knew the drill, he knew the calculus of soldiers and sacrifice as well as Steve did.

Steve opened his mouth, but before he could issue the order to scatter, a blur of red and gold shot past them to barrel directly at their enemy. Iron Man landed right in the Hulk's face, aimed both repulsors forward, and fired them directly into the Hulk's eyes. _"Let him go, now!"_ Tony's amplified voice rippled out over the chamber.

Howling with surprise, the Hulk actually did. Thor reeled to the side, staggering almost drunkenly as he struggled to get back to his feet. The Hulk's head snapped forward before Tony could backpedal again, opened his mouth, and huge flat teeth snapped down on Tony's armor and _crunched._

Clint heard Tony scream, although he couldn't see any blood or at least none from here; he pushed forward, ignoring the pain in his hand, firing every arrow he had left at the Hulk in hopes of forcing him to relinquish his grip. To his side Thor regained his feet, and holding Mjolnir in one hand he snatched up a long daggerlike spike in the other - it must have fallen from the end of the Hulk's chains when he surged forward - and holding it against the back of the Hulk's hand where it braced flat against the ground, he pounded it down.

There was an earsplitting _crack,_ louder than an unshielded gunshot in a small room, and for a moment Clint was sure he'd gone deaf. Before he could gather his wits enough to figure out where the noise had come from, the _crack_ was repeated a dozen smaller times, each coming from below their feet. It sounded like breaking ice, Clint realized, the thawing of a frozen lake -

And no sooner had he realized that than the floor under his feet tilted downwards and gave way, the rumble of crumbling earth around them rising to a roar. The shout was snatched out of Clint's throat as he fell; and all of them, the Avengers, the Hulk, the chains and all, tumbled downwards into darkness.

* * *

><p>~tbc...<p> 


	6. fear of falling (acrophobia)

**acrophobia**

(fear of heights)

* * *

><p>The world <strong>shat<strong>_tered_

surrounded by falling chunks of stone and dirt

suspended in a vicious hissing haze of dust everywhere

obscuring her vision

**visibility very poor flight distance minimal**

_can't see can't reach all alone alone pleasehelpme_

a dozen heartbeats passed and Natasha knew

something was very wrong; if they'd broken into a tunnel

or cavern beneath them they should have hit the ground by now

**no more than a dozen meters, any larger cave could not support the weight of stone above it**

_fall hurt stop fall sudden crunch bone burst flesh pain blackness agony _

a vast gulf of emptiness opened beneath her

heavier rocks streaking away into the distance

she can see the faint shadows of the others falling around her their voices calling out

**rogers, check; barton, check; banner, check **

_damned souls doomed souls faint shrieking torment _

_you'll be one of them you are one of them _

_did you think you could escape you never could_

the monstrous thrashing silhouette of the Hulk falling away

**greater mass less air resistance**

_it's going to get me it's going to eat me the monster the monster chasing running never far behind escape run hide never safe not ever_

**if you find yourself falling from a height of more than two stories,**

**the odds of serious injury are very great**

_fallingfallingfallinghelppleasehelp _

**but survival is possible**

_I don'twannadie I don'twannadie please god help _

**relax the body, bend the knees, curl slightly inwards**

_please please please no no no_

**attempt to land feet-first with the knees flexed to absorb impact **

**guard the head and prepare to roll**

**look for an object to grab on the way down; any object large enough to absorb some of the force of impact will increase your chances of survival**

a torn piece of railing spun past her she reached out to grab it

pain flared in her hand as her nails were ripped away

_oh god please it hurts no please stop_

and she lost it in the fog

**take a visual scan of the ground below **

there was no ground

**locate the optimal landing surface **

there was nothing to see

**and attempt to steer yourself towards it **

there was no ground anywhere there was no end to this fall

how was this possible this shouldn't be possible

none of this made any sense at all

_falling forever no end no ground no stop to it at all _

_just falling forever terror terror alone afraid_

a stone block loomed at her out of nowhere

coming at her like a swung fist but she can't dodge

there was nothing to brace against and it was too sudden

_NO MISTRESS PLEASE I'LL DO BETTER NEXT TIME I PROMISE _

_I'LL BE PERFECT PLEASE DON'T PLEASE DON'T PLEASE DON'T _

struck her on the side of the head, the neck,

the shoulder, blinding flash of white but no pain

but it sent her spinning in the air as she falls

flipped head over heels, unable to right herself or stop

and the spin made her dizzy and sick

**inner ear turbulence disorientation and nausea**

_i'm going to be sick i'm going to throw up i'm going to die_

below her in the churning clouds of dust an eerie orange glow began

**sodium lights? infrared? bur_n_**_ing it's Hell you're in Hell you always knew you would end here you always knew_

and they fall towards it no end but the glow gets stronger

and stronger as she plunged faster and fasterand

somewhere overhead a buzzer sounded **_buzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzttttttttttttt_** so loud it filled the sky it made her bones shake it filled her head and her body and she could hear and think of nothing else

and then everything

just

stopped

She felt a plunging deceleration, as though she had jumped into a swimming pool; a few seconds later, the terrifying speed of passage had petered out, and she just... hung there.

In mid-air. Surrounded by chunks of rock and dirt, suspended without any visible support in the nothingness. A few smaller rocks were rotating lazily in place, but not getting anywhere - and when Natasha made a shaky grab for the nearest one, she too merely swung about disorientingly in the air without making any progress.

She gasped. There was no 'up,' no 'down' - or rather, _every_ direction was down, and the disorienting vertigo was almost more frightening than the free-fall had been. _Zero-gravity, _she thought,_ I'm in zero-gravity somehow. But how is that possible? We're underground, it doesn't make sense, it doesn't make sense..._

Her heartbeat thundered in her ears, deafening now without the wind of passage to distract from it; it seemed to grow louder and louder with every beat until it shook her flesh from within. She was hyperventilating and she knew it, but she couldn't seem to choke it down. _You're panicking. Stop it! _But she was stranded in the dark with nothing to reach and no ground to stand on and no one to trick and nothing to fight and nowhere to run...

A familiar-sounding whoosh of jets met her ears, and a moment later she felt a hard weight knock against her upper arm. She flailed and lashed out, but the man that had grabbed her jerked his head back and managed to avoid the blow; lucky for her, since she realized after a frozen moment that it was the Iron Man armor glaring down at her. If she'd managed to connect, she probably would have broken her hand.

"Whoa, whoa there!" Tony's voice crackled out over the vocalizer. "I've got you, Widow."

"Tony?" she gasped, and then castigated herself; _we're on mission protocols now, fool. Don't use his real name!_

"The one and only." Tony tugged at her upper arm, and Natasha realized with a blurred blink that they were moving, the Iron Man suit providing propulsion to where she had been dead in the water.

"We stopped falling," Natasha said, her lips still numb and nerves overloaded. Slowly Natasha felt her thoughts settle, felt the broken halves of the world come back together like an interlocking zipper. Jagged fragments smoothing together to make a seamless whole.

"Yup. Must be a localized anti-gravity field down here somewhere," Tony replied. "I'd kill to get a look inside whatever's generating it. Hey, maybe if we're lucky, I'll get a chance."

"But we shouldn't have _stopped_ falling," Natasha said, her head beginning to clear a little bit from the overwhelming fog of panic that had gripped her. The gears in her head began to lurch into motion once more. "A body in motion remains in motion. Even if the gravity shut off, we still had enough stored velocity to keep going for kilometers. How..."

"Beats the heck out of me," Tony said. "But here, let's get some solid ground under us." He brought Natasha in closer to his center of gravity with one arm and extended the other in front of him, using just the slightest hissing of jets to slow them down. They were floating gently towards a huge rock, the size of a house, with one flat side pointing upwards; Natasha saw that Bruce was already there, clinging carefully to the surface so as not to float away.

A double silhouette emerging through the mist on the other side of the rock turned out to be Thor, coming in for a landing with Clint clinging onto his shoulders, looking ludicrously like a child getting a piggyback ride from an adult. Clint pushed off from Thor as soon as he was close enough and landed feet-first on the stone, stumbling a little bit as his momentum carried him forward.

Thor hovered for a moment, turning in midair and craning his neck as he searched the sky; then with a restrained half-swing he tossed Mjolnir off in another direction and grabbed onto the strap as it left his hand, pulling him along behind it.

"That's handy," Natasha couldn't help but say.

"Sure, if you like the Amish type. Doesn't hold a candle to repulsor navigating technology," Tony said with a sniff. In illustration he flared out his repulsors contralaterally, sending them into a barrel roll; a gentle enough spin, but it was still enough to make Natasha clutch spasmodically at his armor, the memory of _falling_ still fresh in her mind. Tony must have noticed, because he contritely added, "Sorry."

They reached the stone, and Tony deposited Natasha onto the rough surface with a surprisingly precise little pat. "There you go, all safe and sound," he said. "Be right back. I'm going to go scout, see if we can get a glimpse of where our green friend went." He fired his repulsors and pushed off again, leaving the three grounded Avengers behind.

Clint pulled his way across the surface and braked to a halt next to her. "Hey," he said, sounding completely nonchalant despite the unbelievability of their surroundings. "So, how are you holding up?"

Despite herself Natasha couldn't help but smile at the familiar catchphrase. "I've been better," she said, and really looked over Clint for the first time. He was still favoring his right hand, which had been burned by the acid earlier; and although the zero-gravity helped keep the weight off of it, she could see from the hitch in his movements that the wound on his leg was slowing him down. "How about you?"

"I've been worse," Clint replied, completing the little ritual. He glanced around. "Never any weirder though, I don't think."

"We need to start thinking about what our next step is going to be," Bruce said, maneuvering his way across the uneven stone surface to join their conversation. He was surprisingly graceful despite his usual uncertainty of movement, and Natasha recalled from his file that Banner had once had astronaut training. There had been some discussion of him going up on one of the Endeavour missions to conduct experiments at the space station; plans which, along with so many others, had been quietly scrapped after his accident.

"Make way," Thor's voice called from above them, and they quickly rearranged themselves on the stone face - despite the mass of the rock, the flat side of it wasn't really all that big - as Thor returned with Steve in tow. With a grunt of thanks, Steve pushed away from Thor to drift to a stop against the stone; Thor stayed in the air, apparently perfectly at home there.

"Welcome to the party, Cap," Clint said to him. "We were just discussing how this is gonna go."

Steve's brow wrinkled as he frowned. "Well, there's really only two ways this _can_ go, aren't there?" he asked. "Up and out, or down."

There was a short silence, and then Clint spoke up. "I have a feeling by the way you said that, that you have a direction in mind and it isn't up," he said, half-resigned and half-joking.

"This trick of the gravity, however strange, does give us one advantage," Thor said. "We can travel in one direction as easily as another, simply by choosing our bearing."

Steve squared his shoulders, his jaw firming. "We haven't come this far to give up now," he said. "Bruce, your spectrometer still points downwards, doesn't it?"

"It does," Bruce said after a moment. "But, uh. You might want to keep in mind that the... the Other Guy fell along with us. It's entirely possible that when we get to the bottom, he'll be waiting."

A daunted silence fell, as Tony came jetting back over to them with negatory news: he hadn't seen any sign of the Hulk. Of course, the dust was so thick and the light was so poor that visibility was nearly nil, even with his suit.

"Whatever awaits us at the bottom of this pit, we must face it sooner or later," Thor said with his usual unshakeable confidence. "It will not avail us to wait for it to come to us."

"We've taken some pretty hard knocks," Tony pointed out, with a glance at Bruce that he no doubt thought was subtle. "And this is hardly the best place to try to do R&R. Might not be a bad idea to retreat to a better position, sort ourselves out first."

"I don't see any point to going back," Steve said stubbornly. "We've still got to finish this mission sooner or later, and any ground we lose is ground we'll have to cover later."

"I'm not saying we should abandon the mission, I'm just saying that there's a time and a place for a tactical withdrawal," Clint argued.

Natasha listened to them arguing, floating and place and feeling oddly serene. Her earlier terror seemed to have burned something out of her; together with the weightlessness of her body, it made the entire situation seem unreal, like something out of a dream. A dream that could turn in the blink of an eye to a waking nightmare, to the horror of forever falling and never reaching an _end._

Clint, of course, noticed that she was not participating in the discussion. "You got any ideas you're chewing over?" he asked, leaning towards her. "What do you say? Up or down?"

She blinked at him, still caught in that weird dissonant serenity. "I don't think it really matters one way or another," she said. "Even if we try to go back, I don't think we can, Clint."

His eyes on her narrowed. "What do you mean?"

She bit her lip, then reached around to dig in her pocket for the fragment of newspaper she'd snatched from the factory floor, hours ago. It had been just a fragment of text that caught her eye, a name and a date. "Middleton wasn't always the name of this town," she said quietly. "They changed their name about ten years ago, in order to try to promote a more tourist-friendly image and get out from under the shadow of their old name. I found this, with the town's old name on it." She handed the scrap of paper over.

He took it and his brow furrowed, his lips moving over the three syllables of the name. Then he blanched, the paper falling away as his fingers flinched back. "Oh no. Tasha - no. Just no. That's a ghost story they use to scare new recruits, that - that's just a legend -"

"We've got two legends fighting on our team lineup," Natasha said with a little jerk of her head towards where Steve and Thor were arguing. "Why do you think that only the good legends have to be true?"

"What are you guys talking about?" Tony asked sharply, breaking into their conversation.

Natasha exchanged a glance with Clint, then looked away, studying the stone surface below her intently as Clint answered. "It's - it's just a rumor," he said. "Of a - a haunted town, inhabited by the damned. People go in there - sometimes, they go, like they're called - but they don't ever come out."

"And now," Natasha said, "we're going to find out why."

A buzzing noise split the air above them, around them, cutting off any further conversation or debate. It cut off further conversation, filling the space around her, reverberating in her bones and grinding unpleasantly in her teeth. Natasha tried to cover her ears, then made a grab for the stone surface as the motion threatened to float her away.

A sudden horrible suspicion overtook her, wordless and foreboding. "Iron Man!" she yelled, barely able to make herself heard over the horrendous noise. "Thor! Get to solid ground!"

Thor just smiled at her. "My thanks, but I think not," he said, his voice cutting clearly through the clamor. "There is little enough room on the rock for you four, without trying to squeeze our armor onto it as well."

"No - I'm _serious -"_ Natasha's head throbbed, she could barely think. "That buzzer before - what if the gravity -"

Tony laughed at her, his electronically boosted voice bringing the warm sound to her ear. "Not to worry," he said. "The two of us can _fly,_ remember?"

The buzzer cut out, still sending waves of impact through the dust around them.

Then the gravity came back all at once, and Natasha slammed painfully against the stone. The sudden return of weight knocked the breath out of her, and her vision swam as the dust and pebbles that had hung suspended in the air fell like rain into the darkness below.

So did Tony and Thor.

Natasha had a glimpse of Tony's repulsor sputtering out, the glow of power being swallowed by darkness just like the drones he had fired through the wall in the factory above. Mjolnir too dropped like a stone, its weight pulling Thor along behind it, and she caught just a glimpse of his expression as he fell - pure and unadulterated surprise.

It would have been funny, if she'd had enough breath to laugh, without spending it on screaming. "Tony!" she shrieked, and heard it blended with shouts from all sides of her - Tony's name, Thor's name, falling uselessly into the darkness.

From her left came a noise that did not make up a name - it hardly sounded like a human noise, and Natasha rolled over and pushed herself up on her arms just in time to see Bruce go plunging towards the edge, as though he would throw himself into the darkness after Tony.

"Bruce, no!" Natasha lunged for him and caught his forearm, fully intending to drag him back onto solid ground. Before she could get a good grip Bruce whirled around, face contorted into a mask of pure rage, and yanked his arm free in a violent wrench that backhanded her in the face.

She'd taken harder hits before, but this one took her by surprise and she fell backwards, hot thick wetness spattering over her lips and chin. She was dimly aware of Steve lunging to take her place, trying to grab Bruce and restrain him, Clint going for a headlock. By the time she managed to get sat up, Bruce had shaken Clint off with sheer fury and was now wrestling with Captain America.

"You useless cunts!" Bruce screamed, his voice distorted and thickly raging. "Why didn't you do anything? Why did you just let him fall? You _let him fall!_ It should have been you! What use are any of you? It should have been you!"

This was a side to Bruce Banner that Natasha had always intellectually known about, but never seen before; by the time she'd met him, the Hulk already existed, and any time Bruce would have become this angry, the Hulk would have made an appearance. But the Hulk hadn't come from nowhere, and Bruce had always had this potential of rage - explosive, elemental, furious rage - inside of him. Now, in this strange place where the Hulk was somehow separated from him, it transformed him in a completely different way.

"Bruce!" Steve called out, his feet spread wide for better balance as he struggled to keep the man still, keep him from either throwing himself in an attack or going over the edge himself. Steve Rogers was much stronger than Bruce Banner, of course, but he was hampered by the desire not to hurt his companion - an inhibition that the latter did not share. "You've got to calm down! We can't turn against each other. This isn't helping Tony!"

Bruce ignored his pleas, throwing himself furiously against Steve's hold with the force of his unreasoning fury, continuing to spit vile profanities and half-coherent accusations. Beside her, Clint was looking increasingly daunted, but also increasingly grim, and Natasha thought she could imagine what kind of solution he was envisioning.

The desire not to have to drag an unconscious Bruce Banner along wherever they went left was enough to motivate Natasha to sit up again, one hand pressed against her face to staunch the flow of blood. Her face throbbed, and she was fairly certain the cartilage was broken, but she'd worked with worse.

"Doctor Banner," she said, clearly and cuttingly, hoping that the title would help him remember some sense of professionalism. "Tony Stark is still alive. His suit will protect him."

Bruce stilled at last, his head down and panting like a winded bull, but the look in his eyes when he glanced up at her was evil. "You can't know that," he said, voice raw and lacerated.

"I can," Natasha said. "Our communicators are still functioning. They're all routed through the Iron Man suit. For that to happen, the suit would need to be intact and still within range. As long as we can all still hear each other, we know that Tony is still alive."

For a long moment she didn't know if it was going to work, if soothing the fear would abate the rage; but at last Bruce took a deep, shuddering breath and nodded, going limp and unresisting in Steve's arms. Steve released him only slowly and hovered close, ready to grab again if it proved necessary. Bruce turned his back on them, reaching his hands up to clutch in his hair as he labored to control his breathing.

"Well, I guess this answers one question," Clint said, breaking the frazzled silence. "About which way we're going, that is."

In this, they were all in agreement. Whatever else waited for them in the dark below - their friends were down there.

The going was slow. When they ventured past the edge of their floating island, they were able to spy a few other rocks drifting similarly to theirs, below and off to the side. But the distance was too far for even Steve to jump, let alone the rest of them.

Fortunately Clint came prepared for everything; his quiver contained a special grappling-gun arrowhead, which trailed several hundred meters of thin, flexible polyester line behind it. With a grimace of pain when he flexed his injured hand, he drew back the bowstring and let fly. The arrow disappeared quickly into the gloom, line whipping along behind it, but after a few moments it shivered to a sudden halt. Clint tested the line a few times, then hooked the other end of the line to a solid outcropping to anchor it.

"We can do three, maybe four trips like this," Clint told them. "After that, we'll have to improvise."

The three men took off their belts to use as makeshift ziplines; Natasha wrapped a spare strip of plastic around her arm and used the leather sleeve of her outfit. She went first, on the basis that if the line was going to break it was better that it did so under the heaviest of them, aka Steve.

It was still terrifying to course out into the darkness over the open pit, not knowing if the line's anchorings would hold, not knowing if the line would break and she would fall... but at least she had a point of anchor this time, some semblance of control to the endless fall.

On the trip to the third rock down, Natasha heard a burst of static in her ear as the comms finally flickered out. They all knew what that meant, but no one spoke; there was nothing more they could do than what they were already doing.

Downwards progress was slow and excruciating. They moved from rock to rock, each one hanging eerily suspended in mid-air with no visible means of support, and tried to ignore the sinister unreality of the whole situation. Haze and shadows reduced the visibility to almost nothing; very often they could see no more than a vague outline below them of what _might_ be another rock they could jump to, but there was no way to know for certain until they reached it whether it would be large enough to support them all.

They could not afford to let up focus for an instant. On the fourth rock downwards, as Steve was just wrapping his belt over the line for the descent, the buzzer went off again. Even having heard it twice before, it was no less overwhelming: a pounding, nauseating noise that rang in Natasha's ears and threatened to white out her vision. Steve's soldier instincts were startled into kicking in, and he jerked as though uncertain as to whether to hit the deck and cover his head, or throw a punch. His grip slipped on the zipline, and he careened out of control, clipping the edge of the rock as he dropped and slamming bodily into Natasha. He outweighed her by at least a hundred pounds, and the two of them both went tumbling off the edge of the rock.

The buzzer cut out, and so did the gravity, leaving them both floating in mid-air off the edge of the rock. The scream that had built up in Natasha's throat hund there unvoiced, but it took her long moments of deep breathing before she could regain control of herself.

"Natasha!" she heard Clint's voice shouting, and a corner of her mind registered dryly that mission secrecy protocols were just completely shot to hell by this point. She turned in mid-air, unable to check her momentum, to see Clint struggling to retrieve the zipline in order to re-load his grappling arrow. "Hang on, I've got you!"

"We might not need that." Bruce leaned out over the edge, his greying curls floating around his head and making him look oddly young. "Remember: In the absence of accelerating forces, every action has an equal and opposite reaction."

"Doc, is this really the time for high school physics lessons?" Clint snapped.

"No, no... I got him," Natasha said, her voice only a little ragged. "I understand." She unholstered her gun, moving slowly and carefully so as not to send herself into another uncontrolled spin, and aimed carefully. Then she waited another few seconds for her lazy rotation to line up perfectly, and fired.

The backshot of the gun wasn't huge - the caliber of the gun wasn't enough for that - but it gave a perceptible kick, enough to start her drifting steadily back towards the others. To her right, Steve had apparently figured out the same thing; he took the careful measure of another floating rock a dozen yards away, and flung his shield hard. At first Natasha thought it wouldn't be enough - the force of the shield leaving his hand barely budged him - but then the shield rebounded off the rock and returned along its path, and when it knocked into Steve it pushed him back to safety.

By unspoken agreement they stopped to take a breather, facing each other with their bodies close to the stone surface.

"This isn't working," Natasha said, voicing what they all knew to be hovering in the air. "We need to come up with a better tactic."

Steve nodded glumly. "If the gravity would just _stay off_ or _stay on_ we could work around it," he said. "It's these switches that are killing us."

"Any ideas?" Natasha asked.

There was silence for a moment, then Bruce shifted and cleared his throat. "The gravity flux seems to be on a fixed cycle," he said. "So far we've seen two falling periods, followed by two weightless periods. If they are on a set timer, we would know when it was going to switch, and we could keep moving both during the uptime and the downtime."

Steve pulled his sleeve away from the wrist of his uniform, then grimaced at what he saw. "No luck," he said. "I think my watch is busted."

"All of ours are," Natasha said. "The only one that kept running once we entered the energy field was the Iron Man suit, and -" she broke off, flickering a quick glance at Bruce and then away. But while his hands tightened until his knuckles stood out white against his grubby skin, he seemed to have gained control of himself.

"I can time it," Clint volunteered, and Steve and Bruce both looked at him in surprise. Clint put his good hand up to his throat, tapping the side of his neck. "With this."

"With your pulse?" Bruce looked a little doubtful. "No offense, but we're all working pretty hard. I don't think any of our heart rate is anything like steady right now."

"Trust me, doc," Clint said, giving Bruce a brief smile. "I'm a sniper. If there's one thing I know, it's my own pulse. Give me a baseline, and I'll keep count and call out the seconds before the changeover."

"This assumes that the flux periods are constant," Natasha said. She was proud of the fact that her voice stayed steady, and only the tiniest quiver broke through it. _And that no one's watching, deciding to turn the gravity on and off just to fuck around with us more._

"I think it's our best bet," Steve said after a moment's thought. "We'll have to be careful anyway, but we can't keep on going the way we have been - it wastes too much time. We'll stay in this position long enough for Hawkeye to get the count, and then we'll move the next time the gravity goes off."

They stayed there for the rest of the weightless period, hunched together on the small circle of rock. Clint braced one arm against the stone, the other pressed against his throat, eyes closed. Bruce tried to do whatever first aid he could on their injuries - the gash on Clint's leg, the punctures all along Steve's arms - but they didn't have enough water to spare to wash them out, and not much in the way of antivenom. Snakebite was not a danger they'd been expecting to face on this mission. _We had absolutely no idea what we expected to face,_ Natasha thought.

The buzzer sounded again, filling their ears with the hatefully familiar throbbing; weight returned, crushing them down against the stone. "Eleven hundred seconds," Clint reported, and Steve nodded. They settled in to wait again.

After a few minutes Natasha stirred enough to break open her small stash of emergency rations, the little energy-rich packets that she carried in her supplies. She didn't have much, but there was no point in saving it for later - not when they didn't know when they'd have another chance to stop and rest. Wordlessly she distributed it around to the other three, and wordlessly they ate and drank.

Time stretched and pulled like taffy, yet it seemed no time at all before the buzzer sounded again and Natasha's stomach lifted nauseatingly to float behind her breastbone. "Six hundred seconds," Clint reported. "That one's the short one."

"All right," Steve said. He straightened up with as much determination as he could while floating in freefall, and strapped his shield back on his back. "We should have another eleven hundred seconds of free-fall. Let's make the most of it."

They pushed off the rock like swimmers, diving into the murky darkness below.

It wasn't quite like swimming, of course; on one hand the air didn't drag at them and slow them like water would, but on the other hand they couldn't swim against air, either. Once they'd pushed off from the rock they had no way of changing speed or direction until they hit another one, so they had to judge and time their movements with painful precision.

It wasn't too hard for Natasha, a dive in slow-motion, like a mid-air ballet. The others all had more trouble with it. Clint could see their targets most clearly, with his sharp eyes, but his injuries made it hard for him to push off as hard as he needed to. Steve moved the fastest, but tended to underestimate his own momentum, which ended more than once collided harshly with unforgiving stone. Bruce had neither a clear vision of his target nor any particular strength or grace in his human body, but proved more adept than any of them at judging and conserving his momentum.

Together, they all helped each other: Clint pointing the way for Bruce, Steve reaching out to snag Clint when he would have faltered short of his target, Bruce calling advice to Natasha as she attempted a mid-air course correction. But all the while, their thoughts were on the missing members of their troupe, and worry and fear for Tony and Thor clung to each of them like a shroud.

The light grew slowly stronger the further down they went, a sullen brick-orange glow that did little to penetrate the thickening haze. Sometimes the mist and dust would swirl aside to reveal a glimpse of jagged, backlit shapes, pitch black limned in an eerie red-orange light. It wasn't until they reached one stone platform far off from the center of the others that Natasha was close enough to put all the pieces together into a single shape.

"Hey," she said, calling out to Clint, who was nearby. "Do those silhouettes... does this place look at all familiar to you?"

She'd directed her words to Clint, whose eyes were better than hers, but the others had heard as well; they stopped in their places and turned to look where she was looking, through a gap between two uneven floating rocks. The peaks and valleys that formed the horizon were far too sharp and regular to be natural; they formed overlapping blocks of differing heights with pointed tops and narrow gaps between them. It almost looked like...

"It's a city," Bruce said, squinting at the horizon, taking his glasses off to clean them, then shoving them back on and squinting intently. "Down here?"

"Not just any city," Steve said in a strangled voice. "Don't you recognize it? It's New York."

"Are you sure?" Natasha asked. "It looks more like..."

"Sure as can be. That's the Chrysler building, over there." Steve pointed. "And the American International Building over on the left. I remember watching them get built, when I was a kid. I'd think you would remember it," he said, forcing false cheer into his voice. "since it was the place where we first came together as a team!"

Clint let out a short, uneasy bark of laughter. "So how did - what are we looking at, here? Mole-men? Really, really dedicated colony of ants?"

"Morlocks?" Bruce muttered, just loud enough for Natasha to hear.

Natasha bit her lower lip to keep the words from escaping, and launched herself down to the next rock without saying what she'd meant to. _Hell_, she thought. _It looks more like Hell._

_You always knew you'd come here, eventually._

It had never really stopped being warm, but now the heat was increasing, buffeting them with updrafts that threatened to knock them off their course and which brought with them the piercing stink of ash and burning metal. As they worked their way down, they drew closer to the eerie black monoliths of stone and could make out the luminescent glow of superheated metal rods. The skyscrapers of Manhattan transplanted half a mile underground, impossible, absurd - blistering.

The light was coming from the windows, Natasha saw as they got down below roof level. Rows and rows of glass windows blazing from within, like New York on a busy summer night. The lights flickered and danced as they passed, and something about them drew Natasha's eye - but then Clint was calling out "Thirty seconds!" and that wrenched her attention around. There would be time to make it to the next island - but only barely.

Something was wrong, she realized. Steve had misjudged the distance, or his momentum - or else one of the updrafts had knocked him off course; he was going to miss the edge of the rock. He saw it too, swinging around in a mid-air spin to swipe out with his shield, trying to scrape the edge of the rock. "Ten seconds, grab hold of something!" Clint yelled; he had landed on a smaller island a ways off, too far to help them and with no time to cross the distance.

Natasha made a last-second decision and lunged over the edge towards Steve, hooking one foot over a protrusion of rock to anchor them. She grabbed hold of Steve's elbow just as the buzzer sounded.

She hadn't had time to reel them both back in before the gravity came back on, slamming them both down. Steve was still more off the edge than on, and his weight pulled Natasha over; there was a flash of fiery pain and a muffled _snap_ in her ankle, and then she lost her hold. For a moment all was a confusing blur of red and blue cloth, rock slithering past her eyes with a grating pain on the skin of her hands, forearms, thighs and knees as she was dragged over the abrading stone.

They jolted to a sudden stop, the lash of impact traveling down the line like a whip, and Natasha gasped: she was looking over the precipice over the hot darkness below, updrafts whipping stinging cinders past her face and into her eyes. She had both of her hands on Steve's wrist, holding on for dear life as he dangled over the pit.

"I've got you," Bruce said shakily from behind her. Her ankle was throbbing with pain, but there was a crushing grip on the back of both of her calves. "I can't... pull you up. I'm sorry. I'm just not strong enough."

"You're strong enough for this," Natasha told him, willing her voice to stay calm and supportive. "Cap? Can you get back up?"

"I... I can," he said. He took a breath and swung up his free hand, digging his fingers into Natasha's shoulder. From this position she couldn't possibly exert force to help pull Steve back up; he had to make this climb under his own power.

It wasn't pretty, but at length they had all three of them back up on the stone platform and safe. Steve flopped down ungracefully on the stone, sucking in deep quick breaths. Natasha rolled over on her back and stared at the blackness above, every muscle in her body screaming at being used as a rope ladder. Her ankle was broken, too; she'd felt the sensation often enough to know. Walking on it was going to be a _bitch._

"Guys?" Clint called out. His voice was oddly subdued, almost muffled. "Guys, I think... I think you should see this."

They turned to look.

"Sweet mother of God..." Steve whispered.

Pressed up against the windows - ranks of them - were human figures. Human silhouettes, engulfed in flames from head to toe, obscuring any hint of their clothing or age or gender, just faceless burning torches. They beat their burning hands soundlessly against the glass panes, dark patches opening in their flame-washed faces as they screamed.

As though in a trance Steve began to get up, to lurch towards the burning figures. Natasha's hand shot out and grabbed his wrist, holding him back. "Cap, no! Don't."

"What are you doing?" Steve pulled his wrist against her grasp, but she held fast. "We have to help them!"

"No, we don't. And even if we did, I don't think we _can_," she said. She nodded towards the horrible diorama before them. "Look at them, Steve. Really _look_. They've been burning for God only knows how long now, but they haven't shown any signs of faltering or collapsing. Whatever they are, they're not human any more - maybe not even alive any more. At the worst, it's another trap meant to prey on our compassion. At best, even if we do nothing, they won't die."

"So they'll burn forever, but they won't die? That doesn't help, Widow," Steve said, his face etched with strain. "That really, really doesn't help."

"I've run into burning buildings a time or two before, all for a good cause," Clint said. His flippant tone just barely disguised the thrum of tension underneath. "But in a place like this I'd... really rather not, thanks."

"I won't ask you to. I'll go alone, if it comes to that." Steve took a deep breath. "This is my city. Those people... they could be the civilians from up there, trapped down here, in pain. Suffering. I can't turn my back on them, not if I'm going to stay a person I can live with after."

"Then you're going to have to learn to live with it for a little longer," Natasha said. Steve frowned, and he tried again to pull away from her, but Natasha held him back with an iron grip. "Steve, _listen to me._ Do you remember what Director Fury said when he briefed us on this mission? This... place... is _growing_. It's spreading faster each day and they can't figure out what's causing it. This isn't New York, Steve, but it _could_ be in a few days, the whole world could become like this if _we. don't. stop it."_

At least he was listening to her now. They were all listening, staring at her with a kind of sick horror as the implications dawned on them. Natasha licked her dry lips, and continued. "If we can get to the bottom of this pit alive, I'll consider us lucky. If we manage to carry out this mission it'll be a miracle. Getting out again afterwards... I can't even let myself think about that. But there's one thing I'm sure of: we can't do this without you.

"We're not gods, Steve, we're not genetically engineered supersoldiers. We have no ultramodern armor, no weapons, no supplies, no backup, we have _nothing_ to rely on except what we carry in our own two hands. We've already lost two of our own and we can't afford to lose any more." Pain bloomed in her stomach and chest at the reminder, the vision of watching Tony and Thor drop out of their sight in the darkness, the almost unremarkable _pop_ when Tony's comm had fizzled out. "We're just men and women trying to survive down here, trying to fight our way through horrors and monsters, and we've got no margin left for mistakes."

By the end of her speech Steve was staring at the ground, off to the side. When at last he looked up again, he had a tight little smile on that hurt to look at, that made her head hurt in sympathy with the knitting of his brow. "You're right," he said. "You're right, of course... I guess a Captain's work is never done."

Natasha nodded, although it didn't really feel like a victory.

The buzzer went off again, and they descended. It felt somehow faster and slower than before, with the deathly skyscrapers to measure the depth of their progress: they could see the floors go by through the windows, ceilings and carpets and then ceilings again.

But the stories ticked off so slowly. If this place was accurate to the scale of New York City, then the Empire State Building had one hundred and three floors, counting the observation deck. Floor ninety-eight. Ninety-seven. Ninety-six. The ground - if there really was a ground - was still shrouded in darkness and ashes below. The further down they went, the more the pit seemed to narrow about them, the skyscrapers drawing close on all sides, forcing them closer to the walls with each pass. Even as they swam through the eerie unnatural weightlessness right outside the windows, the orange-lit rooms and hallways inside the burning buildings seemed unaffected. The flames rose and fell like flames in normal gravity, the ashes curled and dropped just like they did in the real world. Natasha didn't even bother to expect this place to make sense any more.

There were more of the uncanny burning specters in every window they passed. If they passed close by one of the windows the burning figures would throw themselves in their direction, arms outflung - whether as an attack or beseeching for help, Natasha did not know and would not get close enough to find out. Others ran mindlessly through endless hallways, trails of fire drifting behind them. _Why do they always run?_ Natasha found herself thinking with an almost numb detachment. _ It never helps. If you're on fire the only thing that will help is to hit the floor and roll until the fire is out. But they never do. Panic takes over, some primal part deep in the human brain, and they always run._

The rocks were becoming smaller and smaller, too, as they went down; they were rarely large enough for more than two to cling to at a time, and they found themselves separated more and more often. More than ever Natasha wished that their comms were still working, and didn't like what it meant that despite how far down they had come, Tony's comms had still not kicked back into life.

During one gravity flux Natasha had to scramble onto a rock further away from the others, so close that she could almost reach out and touch the black glass. So accustomed had she become to the presence of the burning specters that she didn't even realize there was someone on the other side of the glass until she caught a flutter of white. She looked up, whole body tensing, one hand reaching for her holster as the other clutched the rock for dear life.

It was a child, she realized by the height; black-haired and pale-skinned, wearing a shapeless gown of white. She couldn't tell by the hair or the dress whether the child was male or female, but it watched her quietly, passively through the window. There was something about those eyes, Natasha thought, that was all too familiar... something that reminded her of the kids she'd known back in the Red Room, all those years ago. Natasha opened her mouth to call out to the others, then halted.

If the others saw this kid, they _would _insist on halting the mission to carry it to safety. No amount of practicality could convince them to leave a child in danger. Natasha herself was not unmoved by it, but she was also highly suspicious. Every moving thing they'd met since entering this town had tried to kill them, one way or another. There was no reason for the child to be here if it was anything like innocent.

"It's dangerous to be alone down there." Natasha saw the child's mouth move, and she heard the words even through the thick sheet of glass and the distance between them. "Be careful."

Natasha glanced around, saw that the other three were preoccupied with their own trajectories, and leaned carefully forward until she could have reached out and touched her fingertips to the glass if she wanted. "And what is down there that makes it so dangerous?" she asked softly.

The child's eyes widened. Natasha still couldn't tell if it was a boy or a girl; the black hair fell raggedly to its shoulders, but it could just be untrimmed, and the childish treble could have belonged to either. "The bad man is down there," it said, and then hesitated. "And the dark."

"I'm not afraid of the dark," Natasha said, and it was true enough. She hadn't been afraid of the dark since she was a child herself, long ago. Now, the things that lived and moved in the dark... but even those held little fear for her, not since she became one of them herself.

The child gave her a look that Natasha could only describe as incredulous scorn. "Well, _that's _dumb," it said.

"Tasha!" Clint called out, from ahead and below her. "You all right? Need a boost?"

"I'm fine," Natasha called back, keeping her eyes on the window.

"You sure? Forty-five seconds until the gravity's back on," he yelled back. "You might wanna get to solid ground is all I'm saying!"

Natasha turned away long enough to glance around her, evaluating the nearest catch-points. When she looked back, the child was gone.

"I'm on my way," Natasha said and pushed off from the window. She didn't see much point in mentioning the incident with the ghostly child to any of the others; what would it tell them that they didn't already know? But she resolved to keep a watchful eye out when they reached the bottom of the pit.

On the eighty-fourth floor there was a stone platform large enough to hold all of them, so they convened there and waited as the buzzer marked the gravity shift.

"There has to be a faster way down," Steve said with frustration. Even if nothing had actually tried to kill them since the floor had broken out from under them in the mine far above, Natasha knew what was upsetting him; this grotesque facade of the city he'd grown up in, the city he loved, filled with wraiths of the suffering dead.

"There might be," Bruce spoke up unexpectedly. The slow and difficult journey had taken its toll on him more than the others, since he was neither a super-soldier nor a trained athlete. But he had kept up with the rest of them, with a grimly stubborn look in his eyes that warned of the lurking anger within him. He looked now over at Clint. "The periods have been a pretty consistent length, haven't they?"

Clint nodded. "Pretty much to the second," he said.

"So here's what I'm thinking," Bruce said. "If we time it right, then just before the gravity kicks back off, we jump."

The others stared at him in shock. "Are you kidding?" Steve exclaimed.

"No, he's got a point," Natasha said. "Whether we're climbing down in gravity or pushing ourselves off rocks without it, it's going to take a long time. Freefall in gravity is the fastest option, with less risk of exhausting ourselves too much to face whatever we find at the bottom."

Steve frowned. "I'm not sure I like it. It's a risk," he said. He looked over at Clint. "But maybe one worth taking. Hawkeye, what d'you see down there?"

Clint pulled himself awkwardly over to the edge of the rock and peered over it, looking down for a long time. "I can't see much," he reported at last. "Just dust and shadows. It - it kinda looks like the further down the skyscrapers go, they look more like natural rock walls than - but I still can't see the bottom. Sorry, Cap."

"Then we know we have at least that much room to fall," Steve said confidently. He turned to Bruce. "How much time do you suggest?"

Bruce looked like he was doing some quick algebra in his head. "Terminal velocity for a human in freefall is about fifty-five meters per second," he muttered. "If the height of the Empire State building is to scale... I'd say we have about fifteen seconds before we run into anything unexpected. Ten to be more safe."

Steve nodded. "Okay." He looked around at the others. "Are we doing this?"

Natasha and Clint shared a glance, then both of them looked back to Steve and nodded. "Count it off, Hawkeye," Steve ordered.

The four of them crouched on the rock, ready to make the jump, coiled wires overwound with tension waiting to be released. Clint had his fingers pressed against his throat and his eyes closed, lips moving silently. Natasha tried to take deep and even breaths, ruthlessly pushing away the tremors that wanted to shake her body and numb her hands. She could not say if it was the anticipation of the fall that filled her with such primal, unreasoning fear, or the thought of what waited for them at the end of it.

_Our friends,_ she reminded herself sharply. _Our teammates. Our mission._

The insidious little voice whispered back, _and what else? You've been warned, haven't you?_

It didn't matter. Their lives had all been forfeit the moment they stepped foot into this town. They only had to survive long enough to get the job done - that was all.

"Fifteen seconds," Clint warned them, and Natsasha tensed up, teetering on the brink of the rock. Something was happening in the air above them - the smoke and flying dust was swirling, coalescing together to form some kind of shape hovering in the air. Edges rippling, dark patches coalescing into an ominous pattern, a _face -_

"Ten!" Clint snapped, and Natasha launched herself from the rock, seeing out of the corner of her eye the others doing the same. Her hands reached out blindly, groping, and Clint caught one of them as gravity took hold of them and yanked them downwards.

The air roared past them, black-glassed buildings flying past in a blur, and Natasha threw a glance over her shoulder long enough to catch a glimpse of the _thing_ that had formed in the air above them. A face, but a hideously deformed one - skin mottled and streaked with discolored veins, the edges of flesh peeled back and stretched out on some gigantic frame. A face that had been skinned, and left out to dry, yet somehow still hideously _alive;_ brownish-red teeth glinted in rows between lips peeled into a hideous smile. One eye was nothing more than a reddish ruin of gore, and the other bulged out white and glinting, metal straps and hooks peeling back the lid. The eye _moved,_ shifting to track their position, fixing on them like a spotlight, and the gore-stained lips parted in a laugh.

"_What the fuck is that?" _Clint screamed, and for all that he was right next to her, she could barely hear him over the mocking laughter that boomed and echoed from the burning skyscrapers.

_"Going down?"_ the face said, its voice cruel and gloating, and the laughter echoed around them. Natasha would have put her hands over her ears to block it out, if she could, despite the roar of the wind around her. _"Enjoy the ride, friends."_

The hideous face disappeared, or else Natasha lost track of it in the haze of dust and smoke that filled the air. They were still falling. Where was the buzzer? Surely it had been more than ten seconds? Or had the seeming predictability of the gravity shifts been no more than a ruse to lull them into complacency, to trick them into doing something as stupid as _jumping from a rock into the pit below -_

The last of the skyscrapers whipped past her, unreeling like damaged camera footage. Below them was blackness, deep shifting shadows pierced here and there by tall pointed spires of black rock. She should have known there would be no soft, easy landings in Hell. _This is how Thor and Tony died,_ she thought, panicking and unable to stop it, and _no no no no no -_

The buzzer sounded. It seemed to last forever even as they were still falling, and they should have thought of this, accounted for the time of the buzzer itself. But at last she felt herself slowing, like plunging into a deep cold pool of water, until the fall stopped and she was floating in nothingness.

Natasha took a deep breath and opened her eyes. It was darker down here, away from the infernal light of the burning skyscrapers, but she could still make out silhouettes and spaces. She was hovering only inches away from a jagged rock surface, the top of a torn and broken stone spire that arched upwards from the ground below.

"Looks like we made it," she called out, and felt Clint squeeze her hand in response. She felt his arm trembling, and for a moment she wasn't sure whose fear she was feeling, his or her own.

But it didn't matter. They had reached the end of the line, alive.

_What now?_

* * *

><p>~to be continued...<p> 


	7. fear of darkness (achluophobia)

**achluophobia**

(fear of darkness)

* * *

><p>He was in the dark, and the dark raged.<p>

Searing images surrounded him, black on deeper black. The darkness surged and roared like a stormy sea, buffeting him in place with screaming silent voices and soundless visions.

There was a plain covered with corpses, mangled and grotesque beyond recognition, too battered to even tell what realm they had hailed from. There must have been a great battle here, and Thor knew he should rise, take up Mjolnir and fight; what other reason would there be for him to be on a battlefield, but to fight?

He knew he must rise - but he could not, for his body would not obey him, and Mjolnir was not in his grasp. He tried to raise his hand to call to his hammer, to feel its sweet song of battle and destruction cascade through him - but he could not.

The darkness surrounded him, drowned him, crushed him with an unfathomable force. To move even the smallest muscle was as to strain against the weight of a mountain. He could not seem to breathe, and he was not sure _why_, for surely there had been no water below him to break his fall... his fall? Had he fallen?

_Am I dead? _He could not be - could not be. For the dead were supposed to feel no pain. He had seen enough dead to know. His mother, his brother...

In the blackness before his eyes he saw a vision of a longship, laden with flowers and goods - and a body, serene in repose. It was his mother's longship, the last vision he'd had of her before she departed this world. Flames licked up the side of the boat, roaring to new heights as they consumed the fuel of the funeral pyre.

But something was wrong. His mother's body screamed and writhed, twisting in the funeral bed as the flames greedily attacked her flesh. This was wrong - this could not be - Thor had to rise, to go to her, to extinguish the flames and pull her free. But he could not. All he could do was watch helplessly, his voice flat and dead on his lips as he watched his mother burn.

Thunder sounded in his ears; the thunder turned to hoofbeats, and at the limits of his vision Thor saw a mounted figure as tall as a hill gallop by him across the sky. He knew the shape of his father's helmet, horned and winged, sharp and black as skyscrapers against the horizon, and the eight-legged silhouette of his father's mount Sleipnir. Together they thundered across the land, and dragged behind them a cloak of darkness that choked and stifled all that fell beneath it. All stilled, all silent; nothing left alive.

Ghostly walls seemed to waver up around him, shadows cast by shadows. Dimly, muzzily, Thor thought he recognized the streets and houses of the little human village above, seething with mist. Through the swirling fog stepped a familiar-looking silhouette: tall, gaunt, with cruel peaked horns jutting from his helmet and a dark cape sweeping behind.

The shadow of his brother walked slowly through the ghostly town, neck bent and face trained downwards, as though looking for something. At length he stopped, squatting before a pool of deeper shadow, and Thor was seized with a sudden terror of foreboding as he extended a hand towards it. He would have shouted, screamed a warning to his brother, but his tongue would not unstuck from his teeth and he could not _breathe._

And then it was too late. The moment Loki's gloved fingers touched the surface of the pool, a vast wave of darkness rolled from it and enveloped him, sucking him in. All sign of him - horns, houses, streets and all - faded into the shadows.

A flicker in the darkness, and a small figure approached out of the corner of his eye. This figure, alone of all the phantasms, was marked with a splash of color - the white skin of his face, the green of his tunic, the frightened glint of his eyes. Thor knew him. It was Loki, but not Loki as Thor had last seen him - gaunt and hardened, prideful and maddened. This was the Loki that had been the companion of his childhood, the brother of his heart. His pale face was streaked with tears; he was not crying now, but he had been crying much recently.

This should not be. Thor longed to rise, to go to his brother and comfort him, shield him from the horrors of this place. But he could not. However much he strained to stand, to walk, to even raise one hand, he could only manage the merest twitch of his fingers.

"Please don't die," Loki said, and his voice was ragged as he reached out to touch Thor's shoulder. He was too numb to feel the contact. "Please, please be okay - I'm all alone and I'm scared -"

His brother was in trouble. His brother was scared. His brother needed him; his friends needed him. This world needed him. Thor knew he must rise, take up Mjolnir, and fight.

He must rise.

He must fight.

He _must _rise -

...but he could not.

* * *

><p>Back during the War, Steve had spent some time on U-boats. There had been a lot of HYDRA bases throughout Europe to bust up, after all, and Howard Stark couldn't always steal a plane to sneak him over hundreds of miles inland. So he'd ended up on a submarine instead, sneaking around the blockade to drop him off on occupied beaches in the dead of night.<p>

He'd never been part of the crew; he'd only been supercargo (in more than one sense of the word,) and never had more than the most basic safety training. But not being part of the duty roster only meant that he had more than enough time sitting idle while the crewmembers went about their duties, time in which to really feel the immense pressure of the ocean settling in around them, pressing the metal walls of the sub tightly and compressing the air inside.

There were no windows on a submarine, so he couldn't see the vast depths of the ocean surrounding them, but he'd known they were there all the same - those boundless, uncharted depths of an alien universe, all light and warmth and air lost measureless miles above. And except when the sky had come crashing down with him in it to bury the Red Skull's missiles in a watery grave - except when the walls of the airplane had crumpled like tin and the icy water had come gushing in and filling up the floor - he'd never felt that vast unknowing pressure again.

Not till now.

It was too dark to see much, the only light coming from the dim and sullen embers of the burning mock-city high up above, but Steve had the impression of a vast and boundless darkness stretching off in every direction. It didn't make sense - they were under the earth, and he'd seen and felt the stone walls closing about them the further down in that cavernous pit they travelled - but then again, what about this journey had made sense?

The ground, when they finally set their boots upon it, was thick and treacherous sand interspersed with jagged formation of rocks. Steve could barely make out looming silhouettes of darkness in the distance, but whether they were more rocky formations or even fields of some kind of dark foliage he could not say. More than anything else he felt like he was back on that submarine, a tiny sealed pod of the surface world diving deep into an alien environment that tried with every moment, ceaseless and uncaring, to crush them.

There was no actual water down here - they were breathing easy enough - but the air felt thick and stinking and stifling, and every step and every motion seemed to take a huge labor. Or maybe that was the snake-girl's poison after all, still burning through his veins even hours later. On one hand Steve supposed it was a good sign, that his super-soldier metabolism was still resisting the effects of that poison. On the other hand, ever since he'd changed he'd never met a poison or drug that he couldn't burn out of his system in minutes. It scared the hell out of him to think that there was one strong enough to linger for hours, and what if it was getting worse instead of better?

Those weren't things that he could afford to think about right now, and Steve pushed them firmly away. They still had - _he_ still had - a job to do down here, and the first thing they had to do was find their friends.

Once their boots were on the ground, the first thing Steve did was to open one of his sealed pockets and crack out one of his flares. They were higher-tech than the magnesium flares he'd used back during the War - safer, longer-lasting, the light steadier and less blinding - but light was light, and it was hard to improve on the classics.

The ghostly-pale light cast harsh black shadows in every direction, and a sudden flurry of movement around the edges; Steve caught sight of a black skittering thing, the size of a dinner plate, burrowing quickly into the sand. "Everyone, what's your status?" Steve called out.

"Uhmm... I'm okay?" Bruce hazarded. He always had trouble with combat signals, given that he was not usually around for the combat that required them. Steve looked him over - he seemed to be fine, if exhausted, pushing himself clumsily to his feet and shoving his glasses back on his face - and gave him a nod.

"Clear," Natasha said curtly, and moved out to the edge of the ring of light in order to take up a guard stance there, gazing watchfully out into the darkness. It occurred to Steve that maybe he shouldn't have lit the flare, maybe he should have kept their eyes dark-adapted. But then Bruce wouldn't have been able to see at all, and he needed to be able to see his team's condition.

"Clear," Clint responded, but there was an edge to his voice that said otherwise, Steve turned the light towards him. Clint looked the same as he had - tired, grimy, streaked with blood all down one side and his leg - but he turned out his quiver to display the problem. "I'm almost out of ammo, Cap."

Without a word Natasha reached into her boot and pulled out a long, slim pistol that glistened black in the cold light. She unclipped a row of cartridges from her belt and handed both of them over to Clint, who took them with a word of quiet thanks. She was low on ammunition too, Steve thought; he knew she had to be. Yet she divided her resources without a second thought, so that her teammates would not have to go unarmed.

When she straightened up again something caught at her movement, usually so fluid, and Steve caught the barest hint of a wince on her face. When she moved again, though she tried to hide it, Steve saw; the barest hint of a limp in her stride. Steve moved forward, catching her shoulder. "Widow, you're limping. You've been hit?"

She glanced up at him, then shrugged and looked away. "It's nothing."

"What happened?"

"It's nothing," she repeated with an edge to her voice. "I can keep going."

"I didn't ask if you could keep going, I asked what happened," Steve said, letting steel creep into his own tone.

Natasha held his gaze for a moment more, then broke it with a sigh. "That time when the gravity went on and we took a bad tumble. You were going over the edge and I had to brace you." She shrugged again, resigned to the vagaries of luck. "The mass ratio wasn't in my favor."

Steve sucked in his breath. He remembered the fall she meant, dangling over a heart-stopping pit with Natasha flat on the rock above him. "... so this is my fault," he muttered. "If I hadn't been so clumsy..."

"It wasn't your fault, Steve," Natasha assured him. "I made a call and it was the right one. Flogging yourself over it isn't going to fix my leg, so don't waste your time on it."

Steve sighed. She was right, and he knew it. He could at least push the guilt away, even if he couldn't ever fully banish it. "Is there anything that would help?"

"Lots of things," Natasha said dryly. "But none of them are down here and none of them that any of you can do, so like I said. Don't worry about it. As long as I don't have to do thirty-two _fouettés _on this leg, I'll be fine."

Steve made himself smile and nod, but privately he wasn't so sure. Clint had been hurt too and was limping along well enough, but Clint's long-range style didn't depend on fast footwork. Natasha's did, she had to get in close, and if she couldn't get away fast enough because her ankle gave out on her...

He'd make sure that wouldn't happen. He'd keep an eye on her - on them all - and get them through. "You hang tight, soldier," he said, clasping her shoulder again. "I'll get you home."

"Well, we're down," Clint observed unnecessarily. "Which way are we heading now, boss?"

Steve looked over at Bruce. "You've been our guide so far. Any ideas?" he asked.

Bruce shook head, greying hair curling and sticking to his forehead. "On the up side, at least the needle has stopped pointing, uh, down," he said. "So whatever it is that's at the end of it, we're at least on the right level."

"That is good to know... I think," Natasha said.

Bruce swallowed visibly. "The down side is, this gives us no idea where to find Tony and Thor," he said in an almost-whisper.

"That's got to be our first priority," Steve decided. "They can't be too far. We might not have travelled straight down from our initial position, but we can't have gone too far off track. Let's start a search pattern, spiraling out from our starting location. We'll find them sooner or later."

"Or at least," Clint muttered, "we'll find where they landed."

"We'll find them," Steve said firmly. He strode forward, holding the flare high, towards the edge of the pool of sand they stood in. Black-leaved foliage rustled in a soundless wind, and Steve reached out to brush it aside and clear the way.

Steve was an experienced combat veteran, a super-soldier enhanced to the limit of human potential, and a superhero. He did not quite _yelp_ and jump a foot in the air when he found himself inches away from a blank, staring face. But it was a near thing.

"Don't move!" Clint shouted, and Steve knew that he and Natasha had both drawn a bead on the... thing. That was enough to let him regain his bearings.

"It's not a threat," he said, swallowing; helowered his shield and stepped forward. "It's not... alive. I think... it looks like a statue."

Natasha glowered suspiciously. "Just because it's not alive, doesn't mean it's not a threat," she muttered. "Not here."

"I'm pretty sure it's made of stone. Marble or..." Steve trailed off as he stepped forward, gloved hands brushing the black leaves away. The statue revealed was of a man - shorter than Steve, but clearly full-grown - standing posed mid-motion. The clothes were colorless, fused to his body, but unremarkable; the expression was blank and emotionless. It could have been anyone, any man on the street; the only thing unusual about the statue was the wide gaping gash where his throat should be.

Clint made a distrustful noise, edging to the side to get a more clear line of sight. "I'm with Tasha," he said. "Should we take it apart, Cap? Stone or no, it can't be that hard."

Steve hesitated for a moment, glancing from their suspicious faces to Bruce's... also wary, but in a different way. "I think... we're not here to pick fights," he said, taking a careful step back from the stone statue. "Let's... let's work on finding our friends."

Clint looked wildly dubious, and Natasha looked like it physically caused her pain to leave a possible threat standing behind her, but they obeyed. Still, the two of them didn't drop their weapons as they edged past the statue and moved on.

The Avengers moved out in a wide spiral from their starting point; not overlapping their own trail, but keeping within sight of it so as not to miss a yard of ground. Steve shone the light ahead of them, Clint and Natasha watchfully guarded his flanks, and Bruce trailed behind, searching the ground for any clues.

They passed more of the eerie stone statues on their path, all of them frozen standing in place. All of them bore obvious and grisly signs of violence, perfectly and horribly carven into the stone. Here a man with a hole through his eye socket that they could see right through to the back; there a woman with a gunshot wound through the head, the entry wound tiny on the right and wide and gaping on the left. Here a man with his chest blown out from the inside, ribs burst outward like an overripe fruit. There a twisted, charred figure whose gender they could not guess, so blackened and scorched from some terrible fire.

Steve had seen a lot of violence in his life, had seen a lot of men die in ugly ways. That still didn't make it pleasant to see the gruesome imagery of death captured in such silent, eerie freeze-frame, but that wasn't what bothered him about those statues. No, what bothered him was how... creepingly familiar some of the death-wounds seemed. Here, a man with his skull crushed and caved in, and Steve could almost see the shape and the force of the blow that would have done it...

Just when he was on the verge of some gut-churning understanding, Steve's hearing caught the faintest hint of sound from ahead of them. In an instant every sense was on alert, straining forward into the gloom.

"_Hey,_" someone was calling, weak and faint from the darkness ahead, "_hey, guys. Guys. Is that you? Are you there?"_

He knew that voice - one of the voices he'd been waiting for. All concern vanished in an overwhelming rush of relief, and Steve barely kept himself from shouting jubilantly in return, rushing forward heedless of caution. Behind him, Bruce let out a gutteral groan and started to do just that, until Steve caught him with an arm across his chest.

"Don't lose your head," he warned lowly, "not now, not when we've come this far. It's probably him, he's probably fine, but just in case... just in case, let me go first, hey?"

"Then you'd better _get moving,_ Rogers," Bruce growled, and there was a hint of the Hulk's snarl on his face as he did. "I'm not going to wait much longer."

A little shaken despite himself, Steve moved forward towards the voice. "Tony?" he called back, still keeping his voice soft in the heavy darkness.

"_Yeah!"_ The voice was a little stronger now, and Steve could make out the direction; he set off at a quick jog, shield held before him, feeling his way carefully over the rough jagged stone. "_Cap, is that you? I'm here! Over here!"_

He was half-expecting the familiar silhouette of Iron Man to come jetting through the fog on his repulsors, or at least come clanking over the ridge. Instead, as Steve reached the top of the rise and shone his light down the other side, the light fell on the darkened shape of Tony Stark lying on his back on the ground.

"Hey, could one of you guys come give me a hand here?" Tony called out and his voice was weak, still too weak for the brash, boisterous Tony he knew. "I can't... I can't move my legs."

As soon as those words were uttered Steve found himself shoved violently aside, and Bruce ran stumbling the last dozen yards across the rough terrain, and fell to his knees with a painful _crack_ beside Tony.

What passed between them next was not for anyone else to share, and although Steve turned his eyes away - staring intently into the darkness around them, searching for any hint of movement - he could not close his ears. "Hey," he heard Tony say, just a little bit louder. "Hey, big guy, I'm okay. I'm just stuck, that's all. Just a little stuck."

Bruce's returning murmur was too soft for Steve to make out, but Tony's response was clear. "No, it's not, it's fine. I can feel my feet, I can wiggle my toes just fine. The armor's broke, that's all, and I'm pinned under it. My spine is just fine."

Bruce sat back shakily, readjusting his glasses on his face. "I'll be the judge of that," he said sternly, and set to work dismantling Tony's suit with the manual catches.

With clinical precision he reached into the open carapace of Tony's armor and put his hands around Tony's neck, feeling the alignment of the neck vertebrae. He moved carefully down the other man's back, one hand on his chest to hold him flat and ignoring Tony's hisses and grumbles of pain as he checked every bone of the spine.

Only once he was done and found no breakages did Bruce seem to sag in relief, slumping over Tony's prone form. "I don't know how you do it, Tony," he groaned. "Someone must look after fools, madmen and drunkards."

"Yeah, well, I'm three for three," Tony said. "Can you help - help get me out of the legs? The servos are busted, and -" he tried to shift position, then gave up in a grunt of pain. "-so's my shoulder, I think. I can't reach the manual catches from here."

It took the work of three Avengers combined to peel Tony out of the shattered hull of his suit. Tony's work had been well-designed - the suit had, thankfully, taken the bulk of the impact and protected Tony's flesh from becoming a wet smear on the ground (aside from a truckful of bruises and sprains and one badly broken shoulder.) But the sacrifice had been thorough. Only a few isolated circuits on the suit sputtered with life; the rest of it was dead weight fractured into a dozen pieces with the power conduits severed. Fragments of the backplate were scattered around like broken eggshells, both legs and one arm were powerless and unresponsive. The helmet with its built-in computer system and scanners was blackened and dead, so Tony could not wear it with the faceplate down even for the modicum of protection it would provide.

It wasn't just the dead weight of the suit that had pinned Tony's legs in place, Steve realized as they reached them; they were bound up with thick, waxy black thread. It took him a moment to recognize it, and then a chill broke out on his back and traveled down to his sides as he remembered the sight of the spiders vanishing beneath the sand. They had Tony halfway to cocooned before they'd found him. God only knew what would have become of him if they hadn't come when they did, lying alone in the dark and unable to move, helpless to defend himself...

It always surprised Steve a little bit how much smaller Tony looked out of the suit; especially now, with his black undershirt hanging off in ragged tatters and his hair slicked down to his skull with sweat. Natasha and Bruce worked together, quietly and efficiently, to bandage up the gashes on Tony's back and bind his broken shoulder in place. With his right arm fixed securely across his chest and his arm and shoulder swathed in white bandages, he looked more vulnerable than Steve had ever seen him.

He almost hated to ask. "Iron Man," he said, "we're walking blind down here. I need you to give me the best report you can about what we can expect to encounter, the further we go."

Tony grimaced. "Sorry, Cap, no can do," he said. "And I mean it. That's not just me being difficult. My sensors were knocked out and I couldn't raise my faceplate to see out. I haven't seen a damn thing down here. I heard..." He trailed off, a troubled expression on his face. "Well. I honestly couldn't put a name to most of the things I heard. Sorry."

Steve frowned, but nodded. "We still need to find Thor, before we do anything else," he said. "Can you walk? We'll fall back into the search pattern, unless you have some idea of where we should go."

Tony's face turned grim. "Oh, I have an idea," he said. "But you're not going to like it."

"You know where Thor is?" Clint spoke up. "That's great, that's great news! Which way did he go?"

Tony raised his left arm - still in its gauntlet, the only part of the suit left even remotely functional. "That way," he said. "Just follow the spiders."

* * *

><p>The going got harder the further they went, the ground increasingly uneven and broken. They had to push themselves to stagger up steep ridges and then down the other side, gingerly stepping among the loose rock scree and trying not to lose their footing and take a sharp and wild careen into the ditch. The rocks were broken and sharp-edged, and no matter how careful and steady Steve tried to hold the light, it still cast deep and treacherous shadows over small pits and other hazards.<p>

They passed more of the statues as they went, and it seemed to Steve that each one was larger and more ominous than the last. The figured they depicted were larger than life, too big to be human, with lines and scabs defacing stone skin bared to the elements and twisted, sneering faces. Like the others, they too all bore marks of tremendous violence - crushed skulls, caved-in ribcages, headless necks, limbs snapped off at the elbow or knee. Steve tried not to look too closely at any of the statues, nor at any of the jumbled stone fragments littering the ground that might have suggested the shapes of feet or hands or faces.

Steve heard Thor before he saw him, a sonorous rumble of inhale and exhale that tickled faintly against Steve's ear. He raised their light higher and squinted into the dimness, trying to pinpoint the direction of the sound. "Thor? Can you hear me, buddy?" he called out, and got no response.

There was something... off about the sound; Steve knew what Thor's breathing sounded like, both when he was calm and in the heat of battle, or even when he had fallen asleep on the sofa and let out snores that rattled the windowpanes. This was different than that, this was a sound like a bear wheezing in a damp winter cave, cold and wet and labored.

Steve scrambled to the top of another ridge and the circle of the light spread out before him, and the very edge of it lapped against a shape that made Steve's heart lift in its chest. "Thor!" he called out, and started forward. "Thor, it's us, we're here!" The darkened silhouette might have shifted slightly, and Steve heard the faintest sound of a groan in answer, but nothing more, nor did he move to join them.

At first Steve thought that Thor was crouched on the ground, doubled over on his hands and knees, his hair hanging down in a sheet to cover his face. He wondered why Thor stayed in that position, why he did not stand up or even turn to greet his friends and teammates. Then the circle of illumination moved up as Steve did, lighting on Thor's hands... and he realized that the God of Thunder's hands were dangling a good six inches above the stone.

"I heard him," Tony said quietly, his voice laced with sorrow and a deep-laced shame. I heard when he landed, and a few times after, when he called out... when he still could. But I couldn't move, couldn't go to him."

"Oh, _Jesus._" Steve almost dropped the flare - almost wanted to, for what it revealed - and the cold light wavered in his shaking hands as he held it higher, revealing the ruin that had become of the God of Thunder.

When they'd found Tony alive and conscious (if not entirely _safe,)_ Steve had allowed himself to hope for the best. Thor had always been - apart from the Hulk - the toughest one on the team, able to take more punishment than the rest of the team combined and still laugh it off. A part of Steve had been subconsciously convinced all along that no matter what happened, Thor would be all right.

He'd been wrong.

Tony had been incredibly lucky - that his armor had been able to take the brutal force of the landing, that his landing site had been relatively clear. Thor hadn't been so lucky. He'd come crashing down like a falling star, and impaled himself on the jagged spike of a stone spire that jutted upwards from the rocky floor. It went straight through him, punctured from front to back, right through his chest to emerge a good half-yard of bloodied stone point above him. His head hung down, senseless, and his arms and hands dangled limply not quite brushing the stone floor below; all his weight rested on the unforgiving stone fixture that had skewered him. Blood glistened on the stone spire above him, painted the sides of the stone column beneath him, to puddle darkly on the ground, joined by a steady drizzle of blood that dripped from his slack lips.

And yet despite the horrific tableau, Thor yet lived. His heavy frame still trembled and stuttered with each labored, agonized breath, his dangling hands twitched as though still seeking to close upon Mjolnir's haft. God only knew how long he had been trapped here, fixated, but somehow his heart still labored onwards, his lungs still struggled to fill.

"He's lucky he fell face down," a voice remarked from behind Steve, and he turned quickly to see Bruce standing there, his arms folded tight against his chest. His voice was offhand, casual, but it was only a thin veneer of unconcern stretched across a deep distress and dismay. A doctor's calm professionalism, a shield to hold against all the horrors that could befall a living body. "If he'd landed face-up, he would have drowned in his own blood long ago."

"We need to get him off that rock," Natasha muttered.

"It might - that might kill him," Cling objected, his voice cracked and wavering. " 'S rule one of trauma aid - if there's a foreign object in the wound, do not remove it, secure and transport..."

"Yeah, but transport to where?" Tony shot back, leaning heavily against a protruding outcrop of rock. "You're right. It might kill him. But he should have been dead over an hour ago - if he's survived this far, God only knows what else he can survive."

"And besides," Natasha added. "What's the alternative - just leaving him there?"

Clint had no answer to this, so they moved forward as a team. The stone formation that had Thor trapped was slick and slippery in some places with his blood, and Steve had to place his boots carefully to be sure he had sturdy footing. The ground beneath his feet, beneath his hands, was lumpy in twisted in ways he didn't want to look at too carefully - here and there his light wavered across features that looked unnervingly like a leering face, a grasping hand. He did his best to ignore them, averting his eyes until he had climbed up the stone protrusion to Thor's side.

"Thor," he said, quieter now, reaching out to grip his friend's limp arm, "we're here. Can you hear us? We're going to get you down from here. It's," he said, swallowing a lump in his throat, "it's going to be okay."

Thor didn't react, apart from a reflexive twitch when Steve first made contact. Stooping down Steve could see that his blue eyes were open, but hazy and unfocused, without a trace of awareness in them. Red-stained teeth peeked out from between slack lips, and blood dripped in a slow tempo from his mouth. Steve gripped him a little harder, then pulled back his hand.

"You're going to have to provide most of the lift, Cap," Natasha said, and Steve looked over at her. She indicated herself and the other three: Tony without his powered armor, Bruce without the Hulk's strength, herself and Clint, only mortals and already injured. "You know how heavy he is. We'll try to guide him once you've gotten him off the rock, but the power will have to come from you."

Steve nodded, already bracing himself for the unpleasantness that was about to come. He didn't shy away from hard work or hard tasks, but the poison was already weakening him, and Thor was not just heavy - he was _damn_heavy. With all his armor on he was closer to half a ton, approaching the upper bound of Steve's strength even at his best. Now, to lift him high enough to be free of the cruel stone spike, and hold him there while the others maneuvered and guided him... well, he wasn't sure he had that much power and precision in him.

He had to, though. He was the only chance Thor had. "Let's do it," he said.

It took a few minutes more to plan their attack, to fan out around their stricken friend and find the best places to brace and grip and guide. Bruce stood back on one side, Tony on the other, in order to provide oversight and direction. Steve stooped down, shuffling his feet to try to get firm footing on the crumbled and uneven ground, and braced himself with his shoulders beneath Thor's collarbone, reaching out to take the best hold he could on Thor's hips.

"All right, steady as you can," Bruce's voice came from the other side. "Now - lift..."

Steve pushed. His neck and shoulders met the unyielding ceiling of Thor's body, and for a straining moment he wasn't sure he could do this at all. Bench-pressing weights in the Avengers' training room was nothing like this, it was skewed and awkward and he couldn't get under Thor's center of mass to apply force like he needed to. The effort made his heart strain, made spots swim in front of his eyes, and the dizziness that had come and gone in waves over the last hour threatened to overwhelm him.

_No._ His teammate's life was on the line here, they needed him. Steve Rogers wasn't going to let a friend down, not again. He exhaled carefully and shifted his grip, his angle, and surged upwards again - and this time, accompanied by a horrifically wet sucking noise, Thor's body began to rise.

For a moment the light shone _through_ Thor's body, rays of it striking clear through the hole in his chest and glancing off the glistening surface of viscera, the exposed wet whiteness of bone. Then the vision was obscured as blood began to well in the wound, a swiftly-rising tide of gore.

In the next heartbeat a gush of hot blood surged out of the wound in Thor's chest, splashing over Steve's shoulder and chest. Some of it splashed into his mouth, and Steve shook his head and spat best he could to clear it. He kept on grimly pushing upwards, ignoring the terrifying waterfall of blood, until he heard Tony call out that they were clear of the rock.

Natasha and Clint's hands were on Thor, pushing and pulling, and Steve shuffled clindly to the side along with their direction. At last he was able to shift his grip, getting one hand wrapped around Thor's thick-muscled torso and balance the center of his abdomen on his shoulder. They staggered a few steps to some marginally flatter, clearer section of rock, and then began to gently let Thor down again.

"No, not on his back!" Bruce said sharply, and Steve and the two assassins switched courses at the last moment, instead laying Thor carefully down on his side. Bruce stepped up to stand at Steve's shoulder, his eyes shining with concern. "If there's blood coming from his mouth, his airways have been compromised. There needs to be a path for the fluid to drain, or he'll drown in it."

As Thor's body touched the ground, he let out a wet, burbling moan. As if in response, the loose gravel and shale began to shift and rattle, churning as frenetically as a localized earthquake. Glints of shining, patent-leather black appeared in the cracks, followed by long spindly legs that ended in gleaming silver needles. Five, ten... a dozen or more of them skittered across the ground, making for their helpless teammate.

"Get the fuck away from him!" Tony bellowed, and followed that up with a blast from his remaining repulsor-gauntlet. It was too weak to do more than blast one or two away, the rest of them scuttling from the heat and light... but within a few moments they were back again, making for Thor with animal single-mindedness.

"Let them alone!" Bruce said, and the authority in his tone made Clint and Natasha hesitate with their weapons leveled - or maybe they just feared they would hit Thor, if they fired so close. "Let them do their work."

"Are you insane?" Tony demanded. "We didn't go to the trouble of getting him down just so he could be eaten by spiders!"

"They aren't going to eat him," Bruce said. "They didn't eat you, and they could have, while you were down. I think... I think they're trying to help."

That got all of their attention, giving the doctor looks between confused and outraged. "_Help?"_ Clint choked out.

Bruce pulled aside his tattered sleeve, and displayed a long black seam on the side of his arm - a wound, Steve realized after a moment's inspection, that had been sutured closed. "I got this cut on my arm earlier," he explained. "When one of the spiders... got on me, it did this. It hasn't bled a drop since then. I think... I think they're attracted to loud noises like screams or moans, because they're instinctively driven to do this - to get on wounds and seal them up, like this."

A shudder of revulsion went up Steve's spine at the thought, and he wasn't the only one, judging by how Clint flinched away. "So these are some kind of - of first-aid spiders?" he choked out. "Thanks, but no thanks. I'd rather just wait for the doc."

"Except that _I can't help him_ with a wound this size," Bruce bit off savagely. "I don't have anything like the equipment I would need - or even the surgical expertise. I can do surface first aid, but he's hemorrhaging from a gaping wound in his abdomen. At least one of his lungs is punctured, probably both, and I have no idea how his heart is even still going. We don't have any heat source strong enough to cauterize a wound of this size, even if the shock and additional trauma of that didn't kill him outright. If these spiders can't help him, then I don't think anything can."

With that grim pronouncement ringing in their ears, they reluctantly backed away, letting the red spiders swarm their fallen teammate. Thor cried out as the sharp metal mandibles built into his flesh, and Steve's fingers whitened bloodlessly on his forearms as he struggled not to intervene.

But the thick river of red flowing out from under Thor's body lessened, then slowed to a trickle. The spiders peeled off of Thor, scuttling away into the shadows again, and they could see that the grievous wound had been... plugged, was the best Steve could say. At the least, Thor was no longer bleeding out on the rock, but the dark mass of glistening silken threads that plugged the wound did not look anything like wholesome or healthy.

"You know we can't take him with us," Natasha said quietly. She didn't say it as a challenge, or an accusation; it was the simple statement of fact.

Steve nodded slowly, acknowledging the fact even as his heart rebelled against it. But there was no possible way they could carry Thor's dead weight, not over the sort of terrain they still had to travel. Nor any way they could protect him and still fight against whatever they would find at the end. "Then someone is going to have to stay with him," he said aloud.

Natasha gave him a sharp look. "We shouldn't split up the team, Cap," she said. "That's - that's what our enemy wants. Divide and conquer."

"I could stay with him," Bruce volunteered.

"No, you won't," Tony snapped reflexively. Bruce laid a calming hand on his arm, and they shared a long look.

Bruce continued as he took his hand away. "I'm not going to be much use in a fight no matter what," he said with a small self-deprecating smile. "And of all of us, I'm the best suited to keep an eye on Thor and monitor his condition. If he takes a turn for the worse... well, honestly, there's still probably not much I can do. But I'll do what I can."

Steve gave Bruce a long look, then sighed and looked away. He didn't like any of this, but the man's logic did make sense. "All right," he said. "But I don't want you to be defenseless. Has anybody got another spare gun?" He turned to the rest of his team, who exchanged wordless glances.

After a long moment, Natasha walked over to Bruce and flipped her gun around in her hand, extending the grip of it towards Bruce. "Here," she said. "It's got twelve shots left in it. If you end up needing more than that, I don't think you would get the chance to use them."

Steve frowned. "Are you sure?" he asked. "Isn't that your last sidearm?"

"I've still got my knives," Natasha replied, drawing one from her boot to show him, "and my Widow's Bite. It's better for Hawkeye to keep the last gun in our party; his eyesight and aim are better than mine. Don't _haggle,_ Cap."

Steve submitted without further argument, uneasiness gnawing in his stomach as he looked over his team - both halves of his team. So few weapons, to take looking for a fight. So few defenses, to leave behind to guard the injured. But Natasha was right. They could only do the best they could with what they had. Maybe it would have made more sense to concentrate all their firepower - but he wouldn't leave Bruce and Thor undefended. He couldn't do that.

He walked over to where Thor was lying, every breath rattling and gurgling through his big frame. Steve knelt down by Thor's head, reaching out to carefully touch the side of his neck - the only part of him that was not smeared with blood. "Thor," he called out softly. "We're going to have to leave for a while, to get to the bottom of this. Bruce is gonna stay and keep an eye on you. But we'll come back for you both, buddy, that's a promise."

Thor's blue eyes flicked open, still cloudy with pain and fugue. Steve leaned forward, and Thor's eyes slid slowly into focus on him. Thor's muscles seized and twitched with an effort, his hand jerking a few inches towards Steve before falling nerveless again. "Kuh," he wheezed out, his voice painful and bloody. "Cah... tenn..."

"I'm here," Steve said, reaching to seize his hand and squeeze it. "It's gonna be all right, Thor. It'll be okay."

Thor's lips moved; more blood dribbled out between them. It was painfully obvious that every effort to speak just forced more blood into his airway, drowning his words before they found their way free. "I... sssssaw," he managed, through bubbles of blood. "Muh... buh... burah... -boy. Little... boy. Puh... puhleeeze..."

Steve's brows knitted together, as he fought through the messy ruin of Thor's voice to grasp the message he was trying to get out. "You saw someone? A kid?" he asked, for clarity.

Thor's head dropped a few centimeters, a weak nod. "Puleeze... puh... puh... protekk... him. I cuh... cant. Puleeze..."

"I will, Thor." Steve squeezed his hand harder. He had no idea what Thor was talking about, who or _what_ he could possibly have seen in this dark place, as close to death as he had been. But he would try. Whatever it is that Thor wanted of him, he would try. And if there ally was some poor kid down here, lost in this nightmare, Steve would protect him with his life.

Thor's eyes closed, and he sagged bonelessly against the stone. Steve cautiously opened his hand to set Thor's arm back on the ground, and stood. He glanced up to see Clint watching him, a speculative frown on his face.

"What's on your mind, Hawkeye?" Steve asked.

Clint opened his mouth, then slowly shut it. He swallowed hard, looking at the bloodied ruin that was Thor, and then looked back up at Steve with a determined air. "My mind is thinkin' that we don't have enough firepower for this mission, sir."

Steve grimaced. "You'll get no argument from me there. But there's no resupply depots down here, so we'll have to do our best with what we have."

"My mind is also thinking," Clint went on determinedly, "that we need to use _all_ the resources that we have. That we can't afford to leave a powerful weapon on the table, even if its wielder is down for the count." He glanced significantly in the direction of the fallen Thor.

He understood. "You're talking about Mjolnir?"

"Thor's hammer. Yeah."

Steve frowned. There was nothing shameful about sharing weapons in a pinch, but Thor's weapon wasn't just a tool - it was an extension of his powers, a part of himself. It felt wrong to take it from him, even for a good cause, while he was too out of it to give consent. He had never offered to so much as let any of the rest of the team touch it, before. In fact... "Isn't it enchanted? So that nobody else but Thor can lift it?" he asked.

Clint and Natasha exchanged glances. "Not exactly," the redhead replied.

"Supposedly, it's enchanted so that _only the worthy_ can lift it," Bruce filled in helpfully.

"Freaking magic," Tony muttered in the background. "Arbitrary undefined subjective user conditions..."

"That's why we're pretty sure _you're_ our best bet, Cap," Clint added, and Steve blinked.

"Me? Why me?"

"Because, let's face it, none of the rest of us ring up all that high on the personal virtue-o-meter," Clint said bluntly. "I mean... Nat and I... we don't exactly have the cleanest of pasts..."

Natasha stayed quiet, but she raised her chin in just a fraction of a nod, her eyes glittering in the cold light.

"I've actually tried to lift it before - or at least, the Other Guy did - so I know I'm off the table in this debate," Bruce said with a deprecating half-smile.

"But you, Iron Man -" Steve began, but Tony interrupted him with a grimace and a wave.

"Let's not get into the whole sordid story, okay?" Tony said. "I don't really feel like reliving the entire litany of arms-dealing, substance abuse, and general assholishness to my loved ones. Let's just take it as read that of all of us here, you're the one with the best chance of passing the 'worthy' test. If you can't, we definitely can't."

_And if I can't? _Steve wondered. Still - they had to try.

A few minutes more of searching turned up Mjolnir, half-embedded into the stone with a crater blown around it. It wasn't actually far - Steve would bet that Thor had still had it in hand when he landed, before the impact and injury tore his grip loose.

Steve took a deep breath, reached down, and wrapped his hand around the shortened handle. He gave it a tentative tug.

Nothing happened. The hammer did not budge.

A sinking coldness struck Steve right behind the breastbone, the same feeling he'd gotten a hundred times when a pretty girl had snubbed him, times a thousand. The one that made him feel about three feet tall. Humiliation, shame, insignificance, and now something even darker - _fear_.

_Did you really think for a minute that you could do this, Steve Rogers?_ a sinister whisper seemed to sneer at him, specter of a thousand nights of deaths and regrets. _Did you really think yourself worthy to sit among gods and heroes? You're just a skinny worthless Brooklyn street rat on the inside, and even if the rest of them don't know it, you always will._

He forced his hand to open, his arm to lift away from the weapon, and forced a grin onto his face. "Well, it was worth a try," he said lightheartedly.

They all looked back at him, struggling to cover up expressions of disappointment with sympathy - but Steve saw it, all the same. He'd let them down. He'd let them all down. They'd been counting on him, and he hadn't come through. They'd have no super-weapon to back them up now, no god-powers to help them.

As he walked away from the hammer, straight-backed, chin high, he felt more vulnerable than ever.

* * *

><p>~tbc...<p> 


	8. fear of failure (atychiphobia )

**atychiphobia **

(fear of failure)

* * *

><p>Since Bruce was staying behind with Thor, he'd given his modified compass to Tony to carry. They'd left him with the gun and ammunition, half of their remaining water and food, and two of Steve's store of flares. They were rated to last for twelve hours; Steve only hoped it would be enough. Hoped, too, that they would be able to find their way back again when they came back this way, to retrieve the comrades they'd left behind.<p>

The needle swung and wobbled in its metal casing, but pointed more or less in a consistent direction - back the way they'd come, as their luck would have it. They retraced their steps to their starting point, Steve taking as much care as he could to memorize the landscape and its features. Even if that meant paying more attention than he'd like to the gruesome, silent statues and their grisly death-wounds.

As they crossed the landing where they had first touched ground, Steve's flare began to fail. With a grimace he shook it up again, hoping to get more light out of the chemicals in it; it brightened up briefly, but then swiftly dimmed again. "Stupid cheap stuff," Steve muttered, and he set the dimming tube of light on the ground so he could pull another from his store. After this, he'd only have two left.

Tony glanced over at him, flashed him a wan smile in the low light. His reactor glowed faintly in his chest. "That's what you get for using military issue," he said. "Cheap lowest-bidder crap. Go Stark tech, all the way, I'm telling you."

"I'll stick with what I know, thanks," Steve said as he activated the new flare. The doubled light, one in his hands and one at his feet, threw strange shadows about the already-eerie gloom.

Clint was squinting suspiciously at the statues they'd passed. "Are these the same ones from earlier?" he said dubiously. "I thought I remembered them a little differently."

"No, it's the same ones, I'm sure," Steve said automatically. He briefly called up a memory of their first landing here and compared that vision to the scene before him. Then he frowned. Even setting aside the changed lighting and new angle of approach, something was off; something was... not quite right.

It was Natasha who said it, walking in a wide circle around the female statue with the blown-out head. "They moved," she said. "While we were gone. They moved."

_That's impossible_, Steve wanted to retort, but he managed to swallow the words just in time. Too many impossible things today; too much had happened to even say any more what was possible or not. He breathed carefully through his mouth and said, "Are you sure?"

"Positive," Natasha said, her voice level and expression wooden. Her hand crept towards her knives, strapped securely into the band of her belt. "This one and the others were facing each other, before. Now they're facing the same direction."

Clint swore. "That is _creepy as fuck,"_ he yelped. "Are you _sure_ we can't bust them up now, Cap?"

"Don't start anything," Steve started to say, then stopped. The color was rapidly leaching out of Tony's armor, Natasha's hair, his own shield; shadows grew like creeping vines across their legs. He stared at the flare in his hand, hardly able to believe what he saw: the light was dying, dimming to nothing even as he watched it.

"Didn't you just light that?" Natasha said, her voice tense and vibrating.

"_Yes,"_ Steve bit out. He dropped the light - it fell to his feet, barely a glow-worm of pale white - and fumbled for another. Blackness enveloped them like a shroud.

"You got _ripped off,"_ Tony's voice said in the darkness. "Save your spares, Cap. I've got a light built in." At his words, the blue circle in his chest suddenly burst into light, illuminating the clearing as brightly as Steve's flares had. "Here we go, patented arc-reactor technolo_shit!"_

The last came as Tony had turned around to face Steve and recoiled; in the few seconds of darkness before Tony's arc reactor had lit, the statues had moved.

All of them. Silently, without a breeze to disturb the air. One of them - the man with the crushed throat - had moved to place himself between Steve and the rest of them, his face turned off into the distance beyond them.

Into the silence that ensued, Tony was the first one to break it. "I'd make a Doctor Who joke right about now, but the only one who would get it is back with Thor."

"Not now, Iron Man," Steve snapped. He shouldn't snap, he knew, they were relying on him to keep his head, but - "Don't touch the statues, or get near them. Let's get moving again, get as far as we can while the light lasts. Maybe once we get away from this area..."

His voice died down, because even as he spoke, the light in Tony's chest was dimming again. Whatever it was, it seemed to work faster and faster every time they tried a new light source. _"What's going on?"_

"I - I don't know," Tony said, agitated. "It's like something is draining it, but the reactor's not - the reactor's fine! It's still at full power, everything's running fine, it's just the _light_ that's..."

_Going out._ In the blackness that fell like a curtain in his eyes, Steve could still _see_ the blue circle of the reactor, could still see the sickly white luminescence of the flare in his hand, the other discarded one at his feet. They were still burning, but the light they shed didn't seem to travel more than a few inches.

Steve felt something soundless brush against his arm, and he whirled around in the dark, groping for his shield. The sound of steel striking flint broke the spell, and all at once a warm firelight flickered into existence over to his right.

It was Natasha, holding up an old-fashioned striker cigarette lighter. "You never know when you'll need to make a fire," she said, in response to his wild gaze. "But look - the statues, look at them -"

He could hardly tear his eyes away. They'd moved again in the moment of darkness, all of them. The one that had been between him and the others had shifted position again, now on the far side of them and looking away. Another one had come up directly behind him - the faint touch he'd felt on his arm sent a jangling warning signal up and down his spine - but the statue of a man, his eye burst and brain-fluid oozing down his marble face, was not even looking at Steve. He was looking away, the same direction as all the others - except for the female statue, who'd turned her head to look over her shoulder.

Not at them. At something beyond them.

"They're running away," Clint said in a choked voice. "They're not going for _us._ They're all trying to get away from something..."

"From what?" Tony demanded. "What the hell does a _statue_ have to be scared of?"

Natasha's light went out.

And in the darkness, a sound slithered and crawled across the ground, a sound each of them felt in the soles of their feet and throbbed in their ears.

_Scrape._

The cold feeling that Steve had been harboring in his gut spread abruptly to the edges of his limbs, as though he had been plunged into icy water. The Hulk. Of course, the Hulk. How could they have forgotten about him? He'd fallen with the rest of them, and nothing as simple as a fall could take him out. He'd be down there with the rest of them, trapped, like rats on a sinking ship...

_Scrape. Scrape._

"We're fucked," Clint said bluntly, his voice shaking. "We are so fucked. He's going to make paste out of us. We could barely stand up to him at full strength, we can't possibly hope to fight him now..."

_Scrape._

"We don't need to fight him," Steve said firmly, regaining control of himself, pushing the moment of white-out panic down and away. "We're not penned in by tunnel walls or fires, this time. If he's still fettered, we can just keep ahead of him, no one needs to get hurt."

_"If,"_ Natasha repeated flatly. "How do we know that he is?"

"We can keep ahead of him," Tony said slowly, uneasily, "but what about others who can't? Who are pinned down and can't move?"

Steve realized what he was driving at instantly. "Thor," he breathed.

_"Bruce!"_ There was the scrape of booted feet over stone as Tony whirled around back the way they had come, and vague outline of his presence in the dark was gone. Steve surged after him, his outstretched hand just missing Tony's arm.

"Iron Man, stop!" he called after him. "Wait! Don't lose your head and run off. We have to keep together!"

The darkness was split by a thunderous roar, earth-shaking and bone-throbbing. For a moment Steve lost all sense of himself - who he was, where he was, even which way was the ground and which way the sky (no sky down here, not down here.) Even after it passed, Steve was left reeling, completely disoriented as to which way Tony had gone.

_"Chert poberi," _Natasha gasped, her voice shaking in the dark. "We were told, we were warned: the bad man is down there, and the dark, and if you're not afraid of the dark then you should be..."

Clint's voice rose along with hers, trying to calm her, but it was clear he wasn't able to be much help; he was panicking as badly as she was. Steve groped towards them in the dark, trying to feel his way along, trying to regroup.

Somewhere behind them Steve heard a scream rise into the air - a _human_ scream, not the Hulk's infernal baying. Was it Tony's voice? Bruce's? Steve wasn't sure; he'd never heard either of them scream like that before. Had the Hulk come upon their wounded teammate, had Bruce tried to make a stand instead of running for it - had Tony crossed the Hulk's path trying to get back to them? He had to go to them, he had to help them - of everyone on their team he was the only one left who had a chance of surviving against the Hulk. They were too vulnerable down here - weaponless, armorless, weakened, poisoned, crippled, blind...

He tripped over some unseen ridge of stone in the dark; he was barely able to turn the fall into a roll, sharp stones jabbing him cruelly through his uniform. He made it up to his knees and scrambled to stand, disoriented by the tumble. "Iron Man!" he cried out in the dark. "Are you there? Are you all right?"

Then the first screams were joined by another, somewhere behind him - was that Clint? Or Natasha? He turned in that direction (or what he thought was the right direction) and took a step, shuffling painfully slowly in an effort not to trip and fall again. "Widow!" he yelled out. "What happened? Where are you?"

The Hulk roared again, and again it deafened Steve's ears and turned his head. When it died down again, the screams were silent.

"I'm coming!" he yelled out to no one in particular. A worthless platitude, a false reassurance - he didn't even know which way to go.

He was thoroughly lost now, all sense of direction gone in the darkness. He reached his arms out and felt nothing, shuffled his feet forward and found no one.

"Tony, where are you?" he called.

No answer.

"Bruce? Thor?"

He called into the dark, again and again, and heard nothing, not even the distant screams, not even the echoes of his own voice.

"Tasha, are you okay?"

Nothing.

"Clint, are you there?"

"Hello?"

"Can anyone hear me?"

No-one heard him.

_Are you alone, Steve Rogers?_

No-one came.

_Are you?_

"Someone! Anyone!"

No-one was there.

_Are you?_

"Anyone..."

No-one stood behind him, just out of arm's reach, an empty cold breath across the back of his neck...

"...please..."

_I'm here._

(...no-one?)

* * *

><p>"Nat!"<p>

He didn't know how long he'd been walking. Hours, for sure. Maybe days. Maybe centuries.

"Tony!"

Every now and then he'd call out the names of his teammates, and strain his ears for some response. There never was one. He was alone, in the dark.

"Bruce!"

He didn't have much hope left that anyone would answer. But he kept on calling, anyway - couldn't really help himself. Couldn't help trying to make that connection, a point of light in the void. Even if his calling brought the monsters, even that would be better than nothing. Anything, anyone, to know that he wasn't alone.

"Thor?"

But he was alone.

He'd done it again. He'd been given a team - the best, the brightest, the bravest team around - and he'd let them down. He'd led them head-first off a cliff without looking, because he hadn't known enough about what they were going to face. And he'd lost them. He'd stood around like a chump while his friends got ripped apart in the dark. And here he was, walking in circles, heading nowhere.

Of all the team, why did it have to come down to him? He was seventy years too late to understand this world. He was no scientific genius, no hotshot engineer. He didn't have Clint's keen eyesight or Nat's cleverness with people. He didn't have a bunch of fancy magic powers. He was just a kid from Brooklyn who happened to get lucky enough to be the focus of other people's smarts and hard work. What was the point of going on when he'd already failed everyone who had ever mattered to him? Bucky, Peggy, Erskine, Howard. Fury. Thor, Tony, Bruce, Clint, Natasha... why did he deserve to live, if they were gone? He'd led them to their deaths down here at the bottom of the world. Why did he deserve any better?

Even if he survived, even if he found what they were looking for - whatever they were looking for, if he'd even know when he found it - what was he going to do? He couldn't hit a haunted town with his shield. He couldn't punch-out a cosmic horror. He'd failed. They'd all failed. No one would ever know became of them down here in the dark; there'd be no funerals, no monuments, no eulogies for their sacrifices.

Hell, they'd been the best Fury had to send and they'd been ground up like a sausage maker: what chance would anybody else have? Would Fury just keep ordering more poor doomed souls into the breach, to get chewed up and spat out in this evil place, until the pit down here was stacked high with bodies? Or maybe Fury wouldn't have to. Natasha had said this place was like a disease, that it spread without stopping. Because they hadn't managed to stop it, because _he_ hadn't managed to stop it, it would spread all over the country like a cancer. Towns and cities and highways and suburbs swallowed up into the darkness. There would be nothing left. There would be nothing.

With all that he'd done and failed to do, he thought, he really just ought to just lay down here and die.

_So why don't you?_

One step, then another. Then another. It should have been easy to stop; should have been easy to sink down to his knees, then to his hands, and let it all go. But somehow, it wasn't.

Why don't you?

He didn't know. Somehow the time didn't seem quite right, the place didn't seem quite right, to stop walking and lie down. _Just a little further,_ something deep inside murmured to him, a susurration just on the edge of consciousness. _Just a little more. _One more step. One more fight. One more defiant word. One more step.

_I can do this all day,_ he thought.

It wasn't over yet. No matter how dark things looked, it wasn't. He might still find one of the others - he wouldn't count them out until he'd seen their cold dead bodies. He might still find what they were looking for down here: some way to stop this from happening. And if he did, if he could manage that... then it would be worth coming down here, even if it had cost the others their lives. It didn't make it okay, it would never make it okay, but they'd come down here prepared to do what they had to - to sacrifice what they had to in order to save the world. And even if none of them made it out - even if no one else ever found out what had become of them - it would still be worth it, if they managed to do that. The whole world would be their monument, and every living person their heirs: every breath they took would be their eulogy. It would be worth it. It was worth it.

A faint sound brushed by Steve's ears, and the harmonics of it brought his attention quivering to high alert. He tensed unconsciously, ready to spring, eyes straining to pierce the darkness around him as he sought the source of it.

Crying. Somewhere not too far away, someone was crying. Someone needed help.

He took a couple of unsure steps in the direction seemed to be coming from, then began walking faster and faster, until he was almost running. The darkness about him lessened his hold a bit, and he could hear the sound more clearly now: it sounded like a kid. What would a kid be doing down here?

A sudden incline rising under his feet almost tripped him and he stumbled, staggering for a few moments before he caught his balance. The ground under his feet was rising in a craggy, uneven slope that cut off with knife-sharp abruptness on the other side. Steve made his way slowly and carefully along the edge, following the elusive noise of sobs and sniffles that seemed to come and fade.

At length he came to an overhang in the little cliff, almost-but-not-quite a cave. It had gotten a little lighter out, a sort of grey half-dawn suffused with swirling mist, but under the cliff face it was still pitch black: a perfect place for a scared kid to crawl in to hide. Steve leaned down cautiously, peering into the darkness, hearing the echoing sound of muffled sobs coming from the back. A fleeting thought occurred to him that this might be another trap - like the lockers, like the crying women - but he pushed it aside.

"Hello?" he called out softly, although the echoes made it loud. The sound of crying immediately cut off. "Hey, is anybody in here?"

As he peered into the darkness, his eyes adapted a little bit, and he could make out a small form crouching in the low-ceilinged space. Definitely a child, he thought, the low light gleaming off the small eyes and picking out the shining tracks over the cheeks. "Are you okay?" he asked, and then mentally smacked himself - of course he wasn't okay. Nobody here could be. "Can I help?"

"Who are you?" the child said - uncertain, maybe a little wary, but not automatically rejecting him. Steve tried a kind smile, and reached up to push his cowl back.

"My name is Steve," he said. "You might have heard of me as Captain America."

The child shook his - Steve thought his, by the haircut and the voice - head. Steve gave a little shrug. "That's okay. I'd like to help you, anyway. Will you come out?"

"You're all bloody," the kid said in a small voice.

Steve had almost forgotten about that - he wondered how he _could_ forget the river of blood that had poured over him, gushing from the gaping wound in Thor's chest. He swallowed hard, still tasting the oddly alien tang of metal. "It's..." He had to stop, take a breath, start again. "One of my friends got hurt. I was trying to treat him, and I got some of his blood on me."

Shining eyes widened. "Is he dead?" the kid whispered anxiously. "Your - friend?"

_God, I hope not._ "I'm not sure," Steve answered truthfully. "He was still hanging on the last time I saw him, though, so I hope he's gonna be okay."

Slowly, the child emerged from the little cave into the dim half-light, and Steve's eyes widened. Peel back twenty years (or ninety) and it could have been Bucky standing there in front of him, an eight-year-old with his tousled dark hair and dirt-smudged face, clothes rumpled from some bit of ruckus they'd both gotten up to. Not that Bucky had ever let Steve see him cry, as they got older, determined as his friend was to be the big brother and protector to Steve. It was bizarre seeing what could have been a younger version of him, backwards to see him as the little brother in need of protection.

It wasn't Bucky, of course, Steve told himself sternly as his common sense caught up with the sudden rush of emotion. The chin was a little too pointed, the hair a shade too dark, the ears too big. Steve crouched down to try to approximate the boy's eye level. "Hey there, kiddo," he said softly. "What's your name?"

There was a moment's uncertain pause, and then a rush of horrified whisper: "I don't know."

Steve's heart thumped in a pang of sympathy. This place was so horrible, so weird, it didn't even seem unusual any more that it could force amnesia on a person. Or maybe this wasn't a real little kid at all, but some kind of magical creation - and did it matter? He was still a kid on his own and scared. "That's okay," he said again, keeping his voice calming.

"It's _not_ okay," the boy said, and began crying again despite his obvious struggle for control. "I, I, I don't know where I am, or how I got here, and I want to go _home_ but I don't know how... and it's scary here, and I'm alone..."

"Hey," Steve said, breaking into his cycle of misery by reaching out and chucking him carefully under the chin. "That's not true, okay? You're not alone any more. You've got me."

The boy looked up at him with wide watery eyes - steel-blue grey, so like Bucky's eyes - and nodded.

Steve stood up, and held out a hand. "I'm looking for a way out of here, too," he said. "Wanna come with me?"

After a long moment, the boy nodded silently, and a tiny hand slid into Steve's glove and squeezed tight.

They set off across the blackened ground. The silence was oppressive, all the more so now that he wasn't alone. He wasn't sure at first what to say - questions like "are you hungry? Thirsty? Tired?" were not going to be much use when he had nothing to offer even if the answer was yes. But he had to try to talk anyway, to keep the kid (and himself, if he was gonna be honest) distracted from their current situation.

Of course, the kid wasn't helping the conversation much, since most of the answers were the same.

"So, do you have any hobbies?" Steve asked as they hiked up a slope of loose gravel and shale. The kid struggled to keep his balance as his smaller feet sank into the scree, and Steve held onto his hand to keep him up as they forged onwards to the peak. "Any sports or games that you like, or things like that?"

A noncommittal shrug. "I don't remember."

"Any brothers or sisters?" Steve asked next, thinking of Bucky once more. Bucky had been more than a brother to him, and they'd been closer than Bucky had been to his own siblings. Of course, knowing how those siblings had turned out, Steve couldn't really be surprised.

The kid shook his head. "I don't know," he muttered.

"Did you used to live in this town? Before it turned - bad, I mean?" Steve said. It must have been a nice town once - quiet and green. He tried not to think too much of the townsfolk, of the hacked and scorched bodies they'd left in piles in the streets behind them. Had any of those distorted men and women been this kid's parents? Steve prayed not.

The kid dug in his heels, dragging Steve to a stop as he planted his free hand on his hip and gave Steve the stink-eye. "What part of '_I don't remember **anything'**_ is not getting through here?" he demanded shrilly.

Steve flung up one hand in surrender, and had to laugh sheepishly. "Okay, okay, you got me," he said. "I'm sorry. I was just... running on autopilot, I guess. It's pretty scary down here." He admitted that mostly for the kid's sake - to let him know that he wasn't alone - but it struck a deeper pang in his heart than he would have liked.

The kid scoffed. "What have you got to be scared of?" he said sullenly. "You're _strong_. None of the monsters are going to bother _you."_

Steve's smile faded, thinking back over how damn little good his strength had done him this trip. What had he accomplished, really, aside from getting a lot of innocent people killed? "I've got a lot of things to be scared for," he said in a low voice. Then he looked down at the kid and forced a smile again, showing that he wasn't mad at the kid for asking. "Including the people who aren't as strong as me."

"Whatever." The kid looked away, still scowling. The kid looked away, still scowling. "But I don't... I don't think so, anyway. The town... the place we were in... it didn't feel familiar, none of it. I don't remember where I came from, but... I'm sure it was someplace much nicer."

Steve squeezed the kid's hand carefully, trying to project sympathy and reassurance. "Have you been here long?" he asked gently.

"I... I'm not sure..." The kid chewed on his lip. "it seemed like a long time. I kept having to hide, and I had to keep moving so that the monsters wouldn't find me, or so that the dark wouldn't catch me." He shivered visibly.

Steve studied his new companion through careful eyes, measuring him against the memory of a voice over the radio. "You were the one who Tony saw, aren't you?" he asked. "The one he tried to help.

The kid gulped, then nodded. "Yes. I tried to warn him, tried to tell him... no one who went down here has ever come back. I hoped you would get out while you still could, but you wouldn't _listen. " _He shook his head in frustration. "It's easy to get in. But not so easy to get out.

Steve nodded sympathetically. "Well, thanks for trying, anyway. It's good that you tried to help - that you wanted to help." "But we couldn't have turned back - getting in was the goal, for us." _Getting out... we'll just have to see. _ He wasn't sure how that was gonna square with his promise to take the kid to safety, to find a way to get him home. He'd just have to take this one step at a time.

He kept on talking as the two of them hiked over the darkened landscape, mostly to keep the kid's mind off their surroundings and lift his spirits, and maybe his own a little too. Talking helped remind him of the world he'd left behind above, green and sunlit and full of good things and good people. He was halfway through describing the last baseball match he'd attended in 1942 before he'd finally succeeded in enlisting and got caught up in the super-soldier project, when the kid's hand suddenly tightened on his. "Do you hear that?" the boy said, hushed and fierce.

Steve stopped for a moment and stood still, one foot poised mid-step, listening. He turned to the kid with a frown. "No, I don't hear anything," he said.

The kid shot him an exasperated look. "Well, maybe that's because you're too far off the ground," he said. "_ I_ can hear it."

Steve opened his mouth to reassure the kid that it was probably nothing, but the platitude died halfway out of his mouth. Offering comfort and encouragement was one thing, but who the heck was he to say what was and wasn't dangerous (or even what was or wasn't real) in this bizarre landscape. Without letting go of the kid's hand, Steve lowered himself carefully down to the black-dusted ground and pressed his ear against the rock, listening.

Then he could hear it, too. A distant, faint _thudding_ noise, deep and slow and resonant, like the pounding of a giant drum. "I hear it now," he murmured.

The kid tugged on his sleeve. "We should get away," he whispered urgently.

Steve sat up again, the distant thudding noise fading as he moved away from the rock. "I don't know..." he said slowly. "Where there's smoke there's fire. Where there's noise... there's something to make it. I'm thinking this might be the way to find what's down here."

"What? Why would you want that?" The boy flashed him a look that was full of betrayal. "You said you were looking for a way out of here!" he said accusingly.

"Yeah, but..." Steve shook his head. "I'm starting to think the only way out is through."

He glanced down at the child's face, saw the look of terror in his eyes, and added, "You don't have to come if you don't want to -"

"No!" the boy said immediately, clinging harder to Steve's arm. "Don't leave me alone!"

Steve wrapped his arm around the boy's shoulder, giving him a reassuring squeeze. "All right, I won't," he said. "Look, I - this has to be done. I have to do this. But I promise I won't let you be hurt."

The child bit his lip, then looked up at Steve and nodded. There was a trust in his eyes that Steve wasn't sure he'd fully earned.

Hand in hand, they set off again across the plain.

The light was still bad, the mist and shadows swirling around them, but Steve could feel the slow distant drum come up from the ground through his boots as they walked towards the source of it. It grew louder and louder as they walked, still in that slow and sonorous rhythm. _Thoom, thoom._

It loomed out at them from nowhere - large as hill, an ash-grey cliff-face that reared up suddenly from the black basalt plain. The walls were grey, but had an oddly shiny look to them that did not invite touch. Steve looked but could see no entrances, no way to get inside, so the two of them set off to walk around it. He could feel the child's hand shaking in his, and squeezed back reassuringly.

_Thoom._ The beat of the drum came again, seeming to radiate outwards from the walls of the shapeless gray lump, and the air seemed to distort and contract with the force of it. _Thoom._ All at once Steve recognized the rhythm of it, as impossibly slowed as it was - it was the noise of a heartbeat.

And with that knowledge, his view of the edifice before him seemed to shift around until the vision snapped into place: the grotesque, quivering lump was in the shape of a human heart, lying dismembered and disembodied on the infernal plain. The walls throbbed and contracted with each beat, trembling and glistening with unnatural vitality.

They came around a corner to the end of the structure, and there, set into the wall of the monstrous heart, was a door. A plain metal door with steel hinges and a lever-style handle, with no window, sign or lettering of any type to indicate where it might have come from. It looked bizarrely out of place, perfectly square and plain-faced metal door set into the side of the quivering monstrosity.

Steve stepped forward and tried the handle, but it refused to budge: locked. He tried to force it, putting all his enhanced unnatural strength into breaking the bolt of the lock, but there was not even a hint of give. He unslung his shield from his back and slammed it against the lock, then against the door itself, but didn't even manage to chip the paint. At last he fell back, frustrated and out of breath.

The kid had been waiting while he tried to break the door, but now he offered tentatively, "Have you got a key?"

Steve opened his mouth to deny it, but then he blinked in sudden recollection. He _did_ have a key. He fished around in his pockets until he found it, still in the sealed pocket he'd buttoned it in after retrieving it from the bottom of the empty locker. The locker he'd risked pain and danger to open, knowing it might be a trap, but unable to leave someone hurting behind. "You think this'll work?" he asked, but the kid just looked at him without answering.

The key worked, sliding smoothly into the barreled lock and turning the tumblers with a resonant _clunk._ The door swung open.

"Do you want to stay out here?" Steve asked the kid. He would go, he had to go, but he wasn't going to require any innocent bystanders to get involved along with him.

"Are you crazy?" The boy looked at him in incredulous disbelief. "Stay out here by myself, where all the monsters are? I'm sticking with you!"

"Fair enough," Steve admitted, and he led the way inside.

If Steve had hoped that the appearance of the plain metal door marked a return to some semblance of normalcy, he was doomed to be disappointed. The inside of the building was as unnatural and repulsive as the outside; that incongruous entrance led into a series of winding circular tunnels, the walls and floor and ceiling all made of the same mottled, glistening, quivering surface. Thank God that the main hallway, at least, was wide enough and high enough for Steve and the kid to walk side by side without worrying about brushing against anything. From place to place odd protuberances bulged from the walls, the cancerous skin stretched tight over them, and long trailers of some disgusting material occasionally hung down from the ceiling. As they crossed another passageway - this one much smaller and narrower, leading off into darkness on either side - Steve happened to glance upwards, and recoiled.

Criss-crossing the ceiling were long, pus-pale tubes as thick around as his arm, and so long that he couldn't make out one end from another where they all tangled among each other. He saw one of them moving, sliding across the ceiling and weaving between its fellows, and caught a glimpse of the front end: there was no head or skull to speak of, just a gaping mouth lined with jagged teeth which opened and closed in a steady rhythm. Thankfully, the thing didn't seem to sense him - blind and deaf, Steve wasn't sure it even could.

As he walked through the winding, pulsing tunnels with no sign of beginning or end, Steve wished for the compass - or rather the "directional indicator" - that Bruce had made. He wished Bruce were here, at all. He wished any of the others were here, not just because he could use the backup, but because then at least he'd know they were alive and okay.

At last they came to a sharp bend in the hallway, beyond which shone an eerie colorless light. The kid faltered at Steve's side, dragging on his arm until at last he dug in his heels and stopped, trembling.

Steve bent down towards him, keeping his voice soft. "What's wrong, kiddo?"

"I don't want to go in there," the boy whispered. His eyes darted towards the opening, then slid to fix on the ground. "I don't... the bad man is there."

"You don't have to go in if you don't want to," Steve told him reassuringly. "You can stay out here, all right? If something... if anyone comes and bothers you, just shout and I'll come if I can."

Wordlessly the child nodded. Steve gave him a comforting pat on the shoulder, then straightened up and squared his shoulders.

_The bad man is there._ That was something he could get behind.

He walked around the last corner and stepped into the room.

It was a big room, almost a cavern, with the ceiling well above his head and empty echoing space all around. At first glance Steve thought it was empty, since the floor was swept and bare from wall to wall. From the ceiling, though, hung more of those trailing growths, larger than any he had passed before; and when Steve's eyes were drawn to the nearest one, he felt a cold sickness sink into his belly.

The... thing - the growth, he guessed he could say, since it wasn't rock and it wasn't plant matter, it looked like nothing more than a flesh protuberance from the quivering walls of the cavern - descended from the ceiling like a stalactite, a tangled mess of smooth tubes and pitted surfaces. Half-buried within the surface of the thing - clutched like a jellyfish entangled its prey - was a tumbled mass of human bones and slime. One staring eye socket winked at him emptily; the other was pierced through by a tentacle that had grown into the aperture, holding the skull firmly in place.

As he stepped further into the room, slowly, gingerly, he saw similar growths hanging from the ceiling further on. Some also held bodies, in varying stages of decay; others were empty, but he had no intention of getting close enough for them to change that.

And then a voice spoke.

"Ah, Captain." The voice was dry as two old bones rubbing together. "So you made it all this way. I did wonder if it would be you."

Near the exact center of the room, one of the growths hung lower than the others - low enough that the very bottom of it dangled nearly at Steve's head height. It was from there that the voice came, and as Steve stepped hesitantly towards it, it stirred. It contained a body like the others, he realized, but this one whole, this one moving. And the voice was cracked and broken, but somehow familiar despite that. With a deep trepidation Steve moved forward, stepping around to the side so that he could get a look at the face.

The body hung head-down, the last few scraps of black straggling hair dangling into the air, and the legs and lower half of the body disappeared into the tangled growth attached to the ceiling. The skin was chalk-white and waxy, the flesh withered down to the very bones, but he still knew that face, knew it as well as he knew the voice that spoke again. "Either you or my brother, of course," he continued. "Both of you have that, mm, fundamental _stubbornness_ of courage that is often indistinguishable from suicidal stupidity."

"_Loki."_

* * *

><p>~to be continued...<p> 


	9. fear of yourself (autophobia)

**autophobia**

(fear of oneself)

* * *

><p>"<em>Loki,<em>" Steve said.

A burst of recognition and horror and a kind of resigned disgust ran through him all at once. He should have known. It had always been Loki, from the very start, from the first day his safe and comfortable world had cracked open and the Avengers had pulled together to seal it shut. "So it was you? You're the one controlling all this?"

Loki's split and blackened lips moved in a smile, and then he laughed. His eyes were blind and ruined, and as Steve got closer he could make out dozens of lines of black thread running over them, sewing the sockets closed. But he turned his head in Steve's direction as he moved, and his mouth was left free and unhindered for him to speak. "Look at me, Captain!" he said. "Consider my _position._ Do I look like I'm in _control_ of _anything_ right now?"

Steve approached slowly, taking in the ruined mess of his former enemy. Once the initial burst of fear and anger and revulsion had died down, only the horror remained, and a strange sense of pity. Loki wasn't Steve's favorite person by any stretch of the imagination, but _no one_ deserved _this._ "So... if it isn't you..." he said. "Then what _is_ doing all this?"

"You haven't realized?" Loki tilted his head slightly, eyebrows rising over empty sockets. "Why, the _town,_ of course."

"What?" Steve said, startled. "The _town? _But how? A town is just a place. Places don't think - they aren't alive."

Yet even as they said that, his mind raced through their harrowing journey through the town, how from the start everything from the machines to the water to the earth itself had turned upon them vengefully, and Natasha's peculiar conviction that the town itself hated them somehow.

"This one is," Loki replied, "and it does. Do not make the mistake of being so wrapped up in your own perceived superiority that you ignore the fact that there are many, many forces out there that your people do not yet understand. There is power in this place - power that has been congregating down here since time unknown. Others of your kind have tried in the past to bend it to their will, and always failed, for its own will is stronger."

"But..." Steve considered that, struggling to adapt his worldview to contain a living _place_. "But, if the town is doing this on its own, then what are you even doing here?"

Loki sighed. "Take comfort, Captain, that your own people are hardly unique in their capacity for folly. I first noticed this location for its immense concentration of natural magic, and I came to... investigate. To study its potential."

From the little hesitation there, Steve wondered if 'study' actually meant 'find some way to turn to his own nefarious plans.' All things considered, that was probably a given.

"I sought to make contact with it... it reached out to me in turn. It made me promises - oh, so many promises - that it would grant my deepest wish, if I would join its power with my own. Like a fool, I agreed." Loki's voice was thick with disgust. "And my own consent gave it power over me that I cannot break."

"You wished for _this?"_ Steve blurted out, gesturing around him even though he knew Loki could not see him. Or could he? Steve didn't even want to guess what Loki might be sensing right now, what he might be feeling.

Loki's face twisted in a grimace of disgust. "This was not what I had in mind, no. But one should always be careful with one's wishes, Captain, for there is one loophole that is all too easy to exploit: the secret longings of our hearts are rarely ours to control.

"What I wished for, Captain Rogers - in the deepest recesses of my innermost heart - was that _the world should know my pain._ And now, they will."

Steve took a step back, mind reeling. _Know his pain? What does he mean by that?_ He wanted to ask, but he wasn't sure he would like the answer. "So you made a bargain with the devil, and it didn't go like you expected," he said instead. "Figures. But what does... _the town_ get out of all this, anyway? What does it get out of you?"

"Ah." Loki settled back again, going limp and boneless in his grotesque prison. "The town has its own kind of power, its own awareness, but it does not have a _mind _the way that you and I have minds - it cannot truly _think,_ not the way we do. It cannot imagine; it cannot create. That is why it needs a host - something to provide it with the mental structure it lacks, to give shape and thought and movement to its formlessness.

"It sought a mind with power - with potential. It found me. It... called to me. I was curious, so I came." A ghastly chuckle escaped those tortured lips. "They say that curiosity killed the cat. Me, I think the cat got off lucky.

"Everything you've seen in here is no more than a twisted reflection of the thoughts and fears and memories of a living mind. In this case - mine." Another humorless laugh. "Shadow puppets made flesh, that it can twist and dance to its will. And it can use those to manipulate and lure in others - others like you."

"But what does it _want?"_ Steve asked, frustrated.

Loki made a gesture that almost approximated a shrug, within the cramped confines of his prison. "What does any living thing want?" he asked rhetorically. "To feed... and to _grow_. With its roots deep in my mind it has been able to expand its boundaries far beyond what it was originally capable of, but eventually even I will be consumed."

He said that calmly, almost detached, but Steve's gaze went almost involuntarily to the shriveled husks dangling from the ceiling, and he felt horror rack down his spine. But Loki wasn't done talking. "It will need new hosts then, new minds to feed it nightmares that it can reflect back in horrors. With every human soul that is drawn into its web it will become stronger, and spread its tendrils farther. You should never have come here, Captain Rogers, not you, nor any of your Avengers. You have only hastened its dawning."

"No!" The exclamation burst out of him involuntarily, but once it was out there Steve wouldn't shrink back from it. Natasha would try to discourage him, Tony would call him an idiot - and they'd be right, more than likely, but that was too bad. They weren't here, and he was, and he wasn't going to live by anyone's rules but his own. "I won't let that happen. I'm going to free you, I'm getting you out of here."

Loki's voice was rich with disdain. "I knew you were naive, but this is surely a new height of foolishness," he said disgustedly. "You, free me? Help _me? _Have you not forgotten that I am your enemy?"

Steve took a deep breath, squared his shoulders. "If you're telling the truth then right now it's the town that's the real enemy, and if stopping it means helping you, I'll do that and gladly," he said. "But even if you're lying, I can't leave anyone to a fate like this. No one deserves this - not even you."

"How touching," Loki said sarcastically. "But it will avail you naught. Don't - " Steve had taken a step towards him, boots scuffing over the vile floor as he reached out a hand towards the bound figure before him. Loki actually moved to avoid his reaching hand, shrinking back further into his bonds. "Don't - touch me. Do you really think it's as simple as that? If it were only physical bonds that kept me here, I would have been gone long ago; as it is, I am more thoroughly ensnared than you can possibly hope to perceive. There is no escape route for me, save one."

Steve frowned, but drew his hand back; he'd need Loki's cooperation if he was going to shake the man loose, and one way or another the sorcerer knew much more about this place than he did. "What's that, then?" he asked suspiciously.

Loki's smile stretched wider, like a skull's grin. "What else, my good captain? The very thing that heroes are best -"

His word cut off in a choked gasp.

The gasp repeated itself, laced with a hint of a whimper, and Steve looked wildly about for the source. A flicker of movement caught his eye, and he glanced up towards the ceiling and flinched. Several of the thick, tube-like worms he'd spotted moving on the ceiling before had slithered down from the ceiling to wind in among the growths that held Loki caged. One of them wound tighter around his torso, the saw-toothed mouth pressed against the unprotected skin below his ribcage. Steve saw a glimpse of raw, exposed muscle, the wet white sheen of bone, in the instant before the worm's segmented body bunched and surged and pushed itself further into the wound.

The sound Loki was making wasn't even a scream. That was almost the worst part. It was too parched, too weak to be a scream; it was only a strangled, animal-like moan of agony that went on, and on, and on. The needle-legged spiders went into a frenzy, scuttling up and down the growths and over Loki's body until they found the new wound, where they set to busily suturing it up with black thread.

And now that Steve knew what to look for, he saw evidence of their work left in patchworks over Loki's body, each tangle of black stitches the mark of another horrific wound. They grew in size and frequency as they traveled up Loki's torso to where it disappeared into the cage, his legs completely hidden from view - or worse. Nausea welled up in Steve so strongly that he thought he might vomit, or faint, and it was only with the strongest possible act of will that he managed to keep his feet and keep his eyes open.

Loki had spoken so casually of his entrapment here, of the town feeding on him, _consuming_ him; it was only now that Steve realized that wasn't only in a metaphorical sense. Slowly, from the feet upwards, with the spiders tending to every wound to make sure that he didn't die of it too soon.

When it was over Loki hung exhausted and motionless in his cage, too weak and limp to move, panting like a rabbit in a snare. "Like what you see?" he said at last, his voice hoarse and ravaged, barely more than a whisper. "_Satisfied_ at last, that the villain is getting his due?"

"I'm going to get you out of here," Steve said, his voice thick and heavy in his throat. "Loki, I swear it. I'm not going to leave you to this."

An expression rippled over Loki's features that was half-laugh, half-snarl. "How altruistic," he said sarcastically. "Look to your own survival and escape, Captain, before you worry about me. Or would you be willing to trade your life - your life, your heroic career, and all the innocents you might someday save - for mine?"

"That's a false dilemma," Steve denied. "It doesn't have to be either-or. We're _all_ getting out of here."

A pause, and then a slow, cruel smile began to spread over Loki's face. The sight of it, despite all his compassion and pity, sent a pang of alarm through Steve. "We all," he repeated. "What a strange choice of phrase. Not 'we both,' but 'we _all.'_ Who else is there with you, Steve Rogers? Who else have you sworn your word and pledged your shield to protect?"

Steve opened his mouth, then closed it, suddenly unsure. Loki went on, tilting his head to the side with an air of innocent curiosity.

"Shall I guess?" he said slyly. "Let's see. Your mysterious companion is a child. A boy, appearing to be between the age of eight and twelve years of age. Dark haired; he is short for his age, and skinny."

"What? What do you know about him?" Steve said, startled.

"I know more about him than you think. What did he tell you? Did he give you a name? A false one, to be sure. Or did he claim that he couldn't _remember_ his name, or his home, or his family? He's lying, you know. He does that a lot."

"How did you..." Steve began, but Loki talked right over him.

"It's what he was told to say, in the event that he was abducted, or separated from his family and retainers. So that no one would recognize him and seek to hold him for ransom, or as leverage against his family." The mocking smile on his face twisted to something sharper, uglier. "Of course, what he hasn't yet realized is that he needn't have bothered lying; he would not be useful as leverage against the royal family anyway, since he was never truly one of them, and he would have been little missed at home -"

"Stop it!" Steve broke in on Loki's tirade. No matter who or what the kid was - or what his connection was to Loki - there were some things that no child should ever have to hear. "What is this kid to you, anyway? How do you know so much about him?"

"And why should I not?" Loki chuckled, though the sound was reedy and breathless with pain. "My mind is not so far gone that I do not remember my own childhood, Captain. The boy _is_ me, and I am he; the me of my childhood, of my past."

Silence rang in the twisted chamber.

"That's not possible," Steve began, shaking his head. Yet now that he knew what to look for, he couldn't help but see it - see in the kid's face the bones of the man he had become - _would_ become. "He - how can there be two of you at the same time? How can someone from _the past_ be here at all?"

Loki made an abortive move of his head that would have been an exaggerated eyeroll, had he still had eyes to do it with. "Really, of all the things you've lived through to get this far, and _this_ is where you draw the line of 'possible' or 'impossible?' " he drawled contemptuously. "In this place the rules of space and time no longer apply, and a living location has no care for animal notions of time and paradox. That boy _is _my younger self, wandering where he ought not.

"And this gives you an unparalleled opportunity for heroism, Captain America," Loki continued, while Steve was still trying to work that one out. "Kill the boy."

Stunned, for a moment all Steve could do was wonder if Loki really was as evil as he'd sometimes seemed to be, if he could suggest such a thing in cold blood. Then logic kicked in, and only made the request _more_ fucked up - this wasn't just a kid, this was _his own younger self,_ and that meant - Steve didn't understand what that meant. "You're crazy," he finally managed to get out. "You're crazy! Why would I ever do that?!"

A slow smile began to spread over Loki's face. "Oh but you should," he said. "You really should. You see, this is my true past self standing behind you today, no facsimile or phantasm. Whatever is done now, will be just as if it were done one thousand years in the past. If you remove him from the timestream now, all the evil that he will one day do - that I have ever done - will be undone."

"I'm not going to kill a kid!" Steve denied vehemently.

"Are you certain?" Loki purred. "Just think of it, Captain. If he dies today, then there will never be a second prince to usurp the throne of Asgard. There will never be an assault on Jotunheim. There will never be portals in the sky above New York City, never be aliens streaming down to wreak havoc on the innocents there. Can you truly face down the ghost of three thousand dead, and tell yourself that one small sacrifice is not worth it?"

For a moment, an awful moment, Steve was truly tempted. Such a small thing - such an easy thing, to prevent so much loss and suffering. Logically speaking, it was the right choice. Even ethically speaking - _the greatest good for the greatest number of people,_ Steve knew how it went. Many people - _most_ people wouldn't even hesitate before they pulled the trigger. If Fury were here, he knew what his orders would be - the man would probably pull the trigger himself, if not without remorse, then without regret. Did Steve have the _right_ to say no? Didn't he owe it to all those families, all those survivors, to save them - if he could? No matter what the cost?

_No._

It was here that something deep inside Steve dug in his heels. _No._ It was the same part of him that would not lay down and die in the darkness outside. He had compromised, he had given way, he had turned his back too many times. No more. "No," he said aloud, his voice weak at first, but slowly gaining strength.

If the others were here, they might make another choice; but _he_ was here, now, and there was a line he wasn't going to cross, not ever. "No, it's not worth it. Whatever you've done, Loki, this kid hasn't done _anything _yet. He's innocent." Steve swallowed. "I don't know what it's like where you come from, but in America we don't punish people for crimes they haven't committed."

Loki sneered down at him, blindly, all traces of a smile wiped from his ravaged face. "The more fools you, then," he hissed. "I hope you enjoy the presence of all the ghosts that will haunt you for your failure to act -"

_He might not even be telling the truth._ The thought arrived belatedly, but in a burst of clarity. But why would he lie? What could Loki possibly hope to gain by tricking Steve into murdering _his own self?_ "Why are you so stuck on this idea, anyway?" he asked aloud, suspicion coloring his tone. "He's your past self, isn't he? If he dies, then you'll die too!"

There was a long moment of silence. Then, "Your perspicacity is simply astounding, captain," Loki drawled.

"But _why?"_ Steve demanded, frustrated.

Loki hissed in frustration and arched his back, tilting his head down to bare more of his throat and ravaged torso to Steve's gaze. "Look at me, Captain. _Look!"_ he shouted. "I have languished for twenty days in this hell. I know not how much longer I can be forced to live this way, or even if I will ever be allowed to die. If I cannot escape from this pit in one way, then I will escape in another!"

Steve thought he understood, then, and a cold sweat broke out on his back. He couldn't help but imagine how much pain Loki must be in, how deep his torment, his despair, that he would seek certain death over any possible chance of escaping alive. "I get it," he said. "I do, Loki. But I'm not going to be the instrument of your suicide. I'm not going to help you kill yourself."

"Oh, Captain..." Loki said, and the sincere sadness in his voice tugged at Steve's heart for a moment before it evaporated into malice. "You already _have."_

The chamber they were in shook, the walls trembling and the floor heaving. Caught off his guard, Steve lost his balance and went down; when he rolled to his feet the room had changed.

The walls were pulling - _shredding_ away, opening into a vast space as they peeled into long raw strips of mottled shining gray. The roof had receded into blackness, leaving only Loki in his prison hanging like the fruit of some hideous tree. Loki was laughing, deep hacking spasms that went down and down until they resonated in time with the thundering _thoom, thoom_ of the beating heart.

Steve checked around him, glancing back over his shoulder, and saw that the mouth of the tunnel he'd come from had vanished; the dark-haired child (Loki-that-was? Could it really be?) stood in the open space, no walls to hide or shelter him. The kid looked up at him, eyes glittering fearfully, mouth opening to speak. Muscles poised to run.

But he never got the chance. One of the peeled-off sections of the wall curled and twisted and struck like a whip, lashing down beside the boy and coiling about his ankle. The kid was yanked off his feet, falling hard on the ground, and the tendril moved again with blurring speed. One yank, and the kid was dangling helplessly in mid-air, hanging by his ankle in the empty space.

He screamed, the sound shrill and filled with fear, and Steve tried to run forward to his side. The ground shifted like quicksand under his feet, still unsteady from the upheaval, and Steve staggered to the side and fell to one knee without having made any progress. "Loki!" he yelled, not sure any more which Loki he was directing it at. "Stop it! Leave him alone!"

The deep, inhuman laughter was the only answer - surely that sound could come from no human throat. It made him think of the hideous face they had glimpsed so briefly above them in the skyscraper pit, and he wondered who was in control now - Loki, or the town that had subsumed him.

Other tendrils whistled out of the darkness - massive, distorted things, three times Steve's height and as big around as his waist, they nonetheless had fine appendages on the end like an elephant's trunk. Two more grabbed the boy's wrists, hauling him upright in mid-air, and another his free leg. For one moment they held him up in the air, monstrous fibers tightening -

The kid's frightened cries changed to a note of pain, and Steve realized with a horror that stood up the hair on the back of his head what he was about to see happen.

_"No!" _ On reflex, Steve flung his shield as hard as he could, aiming for the thinnest part of the tendril by the kid's wrist. Thank God, that was enough - the sharp edge of the shield sliced the tentacle in half, sending a spray of viscous black liquid arcing through the air and the severed end of the tendril flopping uselessly on the ground, shuddering and convulsing in its dying throes.

Without the counter-pressure, the small figure of the boy swung wildly in the air as the other tendrils lurched to the side. Steve managed to scramble to his feet and sprinted to get his shield, praying that he could reach it and get back in time before they managed to recover.

He did. With the shield held in both hands Steve skidded to a stop beside the base of the tendrils, and hacked at them with the edge like an axe. It wasn't really the right tool for this job - the shield's edge was dull, not a sharp flange - but brute force made up the difference. Steve managed to hack his way through two more of the tendrils, sending up a gory spray of black blood each time, and the last one lost its grip and dropped its burden.

Steve managed to catch him before he hit the ground, an ungraceful sprawl of gangly limbs, and carefully set him on his feet on the shuddering ground. "Are you all right?" he asked the kid - Loki - anxiously, checking him over. No blood, no missing pieces... Loki looked up at him, shock making his expression dull and slack, and opened his mouth to speak.

Then his eyes widened with fear, and he shrank back. "Look out!" he yelled, and Steve turned just in time for the blow to catch him on the shoulder instead of the back of his head. It swept him off his feet and sent him flying a good ten feet away. His attempt to roll with it didn't save him from a nasty knock on the head, and for a moment the world went vague and unreal around him.

_"You can't protect everyone, Steve Rogers!" _a mocking voice called out from the shadows. Steve got to his hands and knees, shaking his head to clear it.

The young Loki was at his side in an instant, small hands tugging at his shoulder. "Get up, get up!" he cried fretfully. "There are more of them coming!"

He was right. There were now a dozen or more of the monstrous tendrils rearing up from the ground, or growing out of the walls. Steve wasn't sure if the three he'd killed were among them, somehow regenerated, or if they were all new. They came in a couple of different forms, he saw; some of them had a thick, mace-like knotted protrusion on the ends, studded with ugly-looking spikes. Others dripped a greenish ichor from their ends that Steve was not in a hurry to have touch him. All of them were looming hungrily in their direction.

One of the mace-like ones came sweeping down at them; Steve barely managed to interpose his shield in time. The blow sent a jolt through him that left his arm numb to the shoulder, but it couldn't get through the shield.

He couldn't fight while holding onto the kid at the same time. Steve looked wildly around for a sheltered nook or cranny, a safe corner, anything; another one of the thick, crushing tendrils lunged at him as he did, and Steve barely managed to throw them out of the way. Loki wasn't heavy in this child-form, but he was still an extra seventy or so pounds of non-centered weight, throwing Steve off balance.

There - to the side, a sort of shelf-like niche against the wall, elevated off the ground floor. The kid would be out of the way there, safe. They just had to get there. Steve dodged again, then flung his shield at an ichor-dripping tendril that was rearing back like a cobra about to strike. It struck true; the tendril lashed blindly back and forth, spewing liquid that hissed and sizzled when it struck the rubbery ground. The shield snapped back to Steve's hand; he let the momentum spin him around and ran.

None of the tendrils were close enough to be within striking distance from here, so the path was clear. Steve skidded to a halt in front of the niche, carefully unwinding Loki's arms from around his neck. The child looked up at him, confused and frightened. "What?" he asked.

"Stay here and stay down," Steve panted, giving Loki's shoulders a reassuring squeeze. "I'll take care of this."

He unslung his shield and was off again, running purposefully towards the center of the room. Behind him, Loki jumped to his feet and cried out a protest. "No, don't _leave me!"_

_"You're too late,"_ hissed the voice of the grown-Loki, deep and distorted.

Only now did Steve realized his mistake; none of the tendrils were aiming for _him_ now at all. Like a fool, he'd assumed that the monsters would go for the armed and active combatant - but they weren't interested in fighting fair. It was the kid they were after, and Steve had just given them a clear line of sight. As one, they were focused on Loki, sweeping in to crush the life out of him.

Steve got there just bare seconds before the first crushing blow. There was no time to try to cut through the attacking tendrils; instead he put one foot against the back wall and braced his shield against the oncoming blow.

The world shook; pieces of the wall and ceiling came raining down, wriggling in an unsettlingly _lively_ fashion before rolling away down the slope. The impact jarred Steve from head to toe, making his teeth rattle, but it gave him the breathing room he needed. Striking out with his shield again and again, he managed to beat back the vile tendrils, hacking away until the ground in front of him was littered with severed slabs of flesh.

There was only one way to do this, then. Steve picked the boy up, pulling him tight against his chest and urging his arms to go around Steve's neck. "Hold on tight to me, okay?" he said. "Don't let go for any reason."

Loki didn't say anything, but his legs came up to wrap around Steve's waist, and he pressed his trembling face against Steve's shoulder.

He stood up, took a deep breath as he re-centered his balance, and faced the chamber. "You can't have him," he said, his voice ringing loud and clear. "You'll have to go through me, first."

_"Do you imagine you can protect the innocents?"_ the nightmare voice rasped, seeming right in his ear despite the distance between them and the adult Loki. _ "There is no such thing. _No one_ is innocent."_

Steve's jaw clenched, and he lowered his head - not in defeat, but in mulish stubbornness. He could feel the child's heart beating frantically against his chest, terrified. No such thing as innocents? Who the hell cared about _that?_ Leave it to the priests to decide the true meaning of sin. Steve Rogers was going to help those who _needed_ his help. "Just watch me," he said under his breath.

Though his mind was made up, his heart faltered as he looked out on the field of battle ahead of him; a writhing nest of snakes, more breaking up through the floor with a sickening sucking noise every moment. Through a clear spot in the thicket, Steve caught a glimpse of the hanging, writhing figure of the adult Loki, still caged in his bonds. Steve took a deep breath, ran forward a few steps, and flung his shield straight at the hanging head. He'd promised he'd find a way to save Loki, but maybe if he could knock him unconscious -

- and it bounced off an invisible barrier, ricocheting off to another part of the room. Steve could have screamed with frustration, even as he went scrambling after his only weapon and defense. His fingers closed on it barely in time for him to swing up the shield and bash it against the sharp questing fangs of a biting tendril. "More invisible energy shields," he muttered in disgust. "Okay, so no one-shot kill, then. Now what...?"

Steve glanced behind him for the exit, but he wasn't really hoping to find one and indeed, no sign of the doorway he'd come in through remained. No surprise there. Besides, he couldn't run, not from this, not when he had a chance to redeem all the sacrifices they'd paid to get this far.

Small fingers were tugging on his collar, trying to get his attention. "The-they have -" Loki said in his ear, his teeth chattering. "Look for - for the th-thin spots -"

_Thin spots?_ Steve looked around again, this time searching not for an obvious hole in the wall but for - what? Something different, some variation in color or texture.

There, he saw it - saw _something,_ anyway. A patch on the wall that throbbed and pulsed, a darker, wetter color than the rest. He couldn't look straight at it without nausea filling his gut, but there it was. "I see it," he said aloud, but if he was hoping for further instruction from Loki, he didn't get it.

But then again, did he really need it? He was an artificially enhanced super-soldier. There was only one thing he was really good at, and that was breaking things. _Just so long as they're the right things to break._

_"You will always be second-best,"_ Loki's voice hissed, and Steve wasn't sure whether the words were even meant for him, or for the child in his arms. They hurt, all the same. The kid's arms loosened around his neck, and Steve had to clamp one hand across his chest to keep him secure. "Don't listen to him," he said aloud, for both their benefit.

He took a deep breath and set off running, dodging blows from the crushers that rocked the floor and tried to throw him off his feet; zigging and zagging to avoid slashing fangs or streams of vile liquid. They still single-mindedly went for the kid, which at least lt Steve anticipate the direction of their attacks; he blocked one ringing club-blow on his shield, then twisted to turn his back to a smoking spit of venom. It splashed across his back, and he gasped at the scalding pain of it, but he did not let his steps slow or his grip on Loki falter.

Then he was through the gauntlet to the wall, up close against the seething darker patch. From this distance he could make out a little more detail; it seemed to throb with an inner pulse, some liquid rushing just underneath the skin.

Steve readied his shield and slashed the sharp edge of it across the thinner patch. It cut through much more easily than his blows against the tendrils. The surface split, and a gush of black blood sprayed out of it, washing over Steve's torso and legs. He stumbled back, staring as the gash continued to pump out the black fluid... just like blood from a wound.

_This place, it's like a heart,_ he thought; it wasn't too much of a stretch to make that connection, as much as he'd been trying to avoid the thought of actually crawling around inside some grotesque living organ. _But maybe that means if I break the walls in enough places, I can give it a... heart attack?_

Just one cut probably wasn't going to do it. Steve took a deep breath and turned to face the chamber, eyes searching for other dark wet patches along the walls. He could see more of them now that he knew what to look for - and some along the sides of the tendrils, too. He stepped forward, ankles sloshing through the spreading pool of sticky black fluid, and began to run.

It was going to be a lot of damn work, that was for sure.

He cut open one slash in the heart wall, then another, then hacked through a poisonous tendril that had latched onto his leg with a multitude of tiny, biting teeth. Each tendril that he killed convulsed on the floor, vomiting black blood into a spreading pool. By the time he cut through the fifth weak spot, he was wading knee-deep in black blood, a thick viscous fluid that dragged his legs and sapped his strength with each step.

His breath rasped in his lungs, stabbing pains in his chest from the broken ribs that hadn't been given a chance to heal straight; poison and fatigue and concussion making him feel like he had never been given the super-soldier serum at all, just the weak asthmatic kid from Brooklyn. It was just an illusion, he knew. The skinny Steve he had once been would have been dead long ago.

But he hadn't given up out in the darkness and he wasn't going to give up now, not when he could see a light at the end of the tunnel at last. They were all counting on him - everyone out there who would be in danger if this thing wasn't stopped, everyone down here who was somewhere out in the dark -

_"Your friends are already dead!" _Loki yelled out, malice strong in his voice, and Steve almost stumbled. "_You brought them down here and you left them to die!"_

Steve's mind was numb. He couldn't think about that right now, couldn't let himself feel... _he's probably lying,_ he thought wildly, and couldn't even tell whether he was just trying to comfort himself or not. He felt Loki's heart rabbiting against his chest, and took a moment to put one gloved hand on his head, feeling the stickiness in the soft dark hair. Here was one person he hadn't failed, at least not yet. One person still counting on him.

The room was filling up more and more now, a dark ocean of rotting blood, and Steve wondered how much was _enough._ Whether he'd even know it when the job was done. The further he went, the harder it was to continue; some of the lower walls were blocked from sight completely now.

Up overhead - nearly out of sight, invisible if Steve didn't know by now what he was looking for - a wet patch glimmered, pulsing with liquid in the shadowed light. Steve hauled himself out of the reach of a raking tendril - they were growing only more vicious as their numbers dwindled - and heaved his shield upwards.

The sky fell in.

A hideous shriek erupted - Steve couldn't even tell which direction it came from - as a black wave came sluicing down at them. He had to scramble to get out of the way, and within seconds he found he was half-swimming in black fluid, the liquid level rising dangerously fast. Minutes ago it had been up to his hips - now it was up to his waist.

Steve tried not to panic, pulling strongly over towards what he hoped would be higher ground. The walls and ceiling of the room were shuddering, trembling from some cataclysmic force, and the remaining tendrils were jerking back and forth in mindless spasms. The constant, steady _thoom, thoom_ of the eldritch heartbeat was stuttering, thumping faster but weak and frantic, the rhythm failing. _I've done it,_ Steve thought in a brief moment of triumph, before the more immediate dread pushed the thought away.

Loki cried out as black fluid splashed against Steve's chest, wriggling against Steve's hold - whether struggling to get away, or trying to cling tighter Steve wasn't sure. Either way, the reminder that Loki was much shorter than him and would soon find himself overwhelmed, gave Steve a burst of inspiration. He half-sloshed, half-swam through the rising tide towards one of the hanging protrusions - this one thankfully free of old bones - and used it to pull himself and the kid up out of the water. He had a moment's worry that it would come to life and try to grab him, pulling him in to devour him like the others, but though the tangled mats twitched in his hands it made no move to come alive.

Either that or it, along with everything else, was too busy dying.

The new vantage gave them a moment's respite, but the tide of black blood was _still_ rising. It crept up along the walls, the dome of clear space below the ceiling shrinking perceptibly by the second. Dark currents buffeted him, tugging at his legs, but he clung to his post, looking frantically around for a way out - he hadn't seen one before, but if a doorway decided to open itself up _right now_ Steve wouldn't turn up his nose at it.

Of all the ways Steve thought he might die - from the time the War started until the day this insane mission began - he never thought it would be drowning in a literal ocean of blood. Steve hitched the kid a little further up along his chest, boosting him up against his shoulder, in the hope that he would at least have a little more air to breathe than Steve.

_"Enough,"_ Loki's voice whispered, echoing through the fluid-filled cavern.

It was as though a plug had pulled somewhere, and all the fluid in the cavern was sucked into it with a cavernous gulp. Steve had to cling to his perch for dear life, and to Loki too, to keep either of them from being sucked down with it.

The water level dropped almost as precipitously as it had risen, and before too long Steve could make out the floor below them, glistening and slick with the wet. He hesitated for a long moment - he didn't trust the sudden illusion of safety, but he couldn't keep clinging here forever - and let go.

When he landed he stumbled and almost ripped his ankles open, because the ground wasn't the firm, unnervingly rubbery substance of before. Instead, it was more like landing in deep mud - or sand. Even as he staggered to get his balance back, he could feel more of it crumbling away beneath his feet.

Nor was it only the ground that was crumbling. The shaking that had rocked the cavern had subsided into a low rumbling, but with every tremor pieces broke off from the walls and skittered onto the floor. The walls themselves were _slumping,_ melting in their outlines and sliding down themselves into formless heaps as if they, too, were made of sand.

"So you did it, after all," a voice came from behind him, and Steve turned to see Loki - the adult Loki - still hanging in his cage. Loki seemed to be undergoing the same dissolution was the rest of the chamber, but there was no fear or pain on that ravaged face. Instead, he looked almost - peaceful. "I wasn't sure that you could. I... just might have underestimated you, Captain Rogers."

Steve opened his mouth, then closed it, deeply confused. Loki - or whatever was possessing Loki - had just tried to _kill_ him; why did he sound... _happy_ that he had failed?

Or then again, it was never _Steve _ he'd been trying to kill - it was the boy. Steve loosened his grip, let Loki slide down off his hip to stand beside him on the shifting ground, although he kept hold of the child's hand. "You won't hurt him," he said, as firmly as he could.

Loki laughed, the sound now a soft and raspy chuckle. "It is no longer me that he needs to fear," he said, "but what others will make of him. Or... attempt to make of him. Care for him, Steve Rogers; there are very few that I would trust in this, but you have proven yourself beyond all... shadows."

He shifted - no, the _skin_ on his face shifted, flaking apart and falling away like ratty old newspaper. "But - I promised I would save you!" Steve blurted, distressed.

That skull-face smiled, even as the lips peeled away into dust. "Oh, Captain," Loki said, and again that soft, velvet chuckle. "You already _have."_

Clouds of dust billowed downwards from his body, shifting in the lurid light in shades of white and black. A stream of white dust peeled away from the haze surrounding Loki's body, leaving the darker shifting mass behind. It flowed directly towards the kid, engulfing him before Steve could do anything to stop it - though Loki stiffened and gasped as the white dust surrounded him, it didn't seem to be hurting him.

_"All the virtue that was left in me, is now in him,"_ he heard Loki's voice echoing in the small space. _"How fitting, is it not, that he should be so small."_

Steve knelt quickly before the kid, making sure he was all right - his eyes and mouth were wide and startled, and a faint luminous light sparkled around him. When Steve glanced behind him, the clouds of dark sand were pouring lifelessly onto the ground beneath Loki's prison. Of Loki himself, there was nothing left but bones; even as Steve watched, those crumbled and fell away.

With a rumble like distant thunder, the roof collapsed; Steve instinctively swung his shield over both of them in the vain hope of protection, but all that pattered down on top of them was a light coating of ash.

* * *

><p>The dust took a long time to settle. Steve took the opportunity to slump to the ground, resting his aching limbs for the first time in what seemed hours. He stared at his hands, trying to figure out what about them seemed wrong; gradually it dawned on him that there was no longer any trace of the sticky black blood he'd been swimming in. No trace at all.<p>

"Captain Rogers?" a high-pitched voice said from beside him, and Steve turned over and tried to push himself up, to focus. Loki - the boy Loki - was standing not far away, the vibranium shield in his hands. "I believe this is yours."

"Thanks." Steve reached out to take it, but hesitated a moment before their hands met. There was something different about the kid now, something about his speech and his bearing that seemed a lot more... grown up. He met Loki's eyes - blue-grey in the dimness - and the kid released his grip on the shield and backed away, looking down at the ground.

Steve had to clear his throat before he could continue. "You all right?" he managed to say. Loki's head came up, and he gave Steve a startled look, as though that were not the question he was expecting.

He hesitated, then nodded and clasped his hands behind his back. "Thanks to you, I have avoided any serious injury," he said quietly.

"It looked like he did something to you, there at the end," Steve said, carefully keeping his voice even, non-accusatory.

Loki swallowed, and looked away again. "_Did _ something to me? No... it was more like... he _gave_ something to me. Parts of... parts of himself."

He stared off into the amorphous fog, obviously seeing something very different inside his head. "I can see... his memories. Places he's been... things he'd learned. Wonders and... and horrors, too, but..."

Loki trailed off, but when Steve did not respond, he gulped and plunged onwards. "It's funny... he... I mean I... was so angry. I remember that he was so angry. But I don't _feel_ the anger, not the way he did... I mean I used to. It's more.. abstract. Far away."

After a long moment of silence, he looked over at Steve. "Are you going to kill me now?" he said calmly.

"What?" Steve started out of the half-daze he'd been sitting in, still trying to process all that had happened in the past hour. "Why would I do a thing like that?!"

"Because..." Loki took a deep breath, wobbling just a little, and raised his chin defiantly. "Because I am the bad guy."

Steve studied him carefully. It was clear that the Loki wasn't the same as he had been before the fight; he wasn't the naive child Steve had met in the shadowed lands. But he wasn't the invader of New York, either. He was something different - something new. Or maybe something old, Loki as he had been before he'd fallen into whatever evil or madness had sent him down that path. No one was born evil, after all - Steve believed that more than anything else in the world.

What the heck, he'd been ready to carry _Loki_ to freedom from that place and damn the consequences. He wasn't about to do any less for this kid.

"I don't quite know who you are now," Steve admitted quietly. "I get the feeling you aren't completely sure, either.

"But I'm sure of one thing: You've never done anything wrong, and I'm not going to punish you or let anyone else punish you either. You have another chance now, and I'll make sure you get the most of it."

Loki took a deep gulp of air - it sounded like a sob - and huddled down for a moment, hiding his face in his hands and knees. Steve sighed and let his head fall back, giving Loki at least the illusion of privacy - and also, it was easier. He was damn tired.

"Thank you," Loki said at last, looking up at him with red-rimmed eyes and a serious expression. "For saving me. For not letting - for not letting me die."

For a moment Steve hesitated, unsure what to say. 'You're welcome' was an empty pleasantry that didn't seem to cover it. 'It was nothing' just wasn't true, not for the kid - to him, it was everything. "I'd do it again," he told Loki, instead. "Anytime."

And that might not be just words. This kid, this child-version of their greatest enemy... well, it looked like he was going to have to do his growing-up all over again. Steve didn't understand a lot of what had just happened, and wasn't sure he ever would - but he had never been one to shrink away from consequences. He would see it through all the same, and that meant not saving Loki just to dump him somewhere. He'd look after the kid or find someone else to look after him, and Loki had made a lot of enemies, some of whom probably wouldn't balk at hurting a child. Loki would need a defender, and Steve was more than willing to fill the bill.

Unless, of course, there was some way to get Loki back to his home. Steve had only the vaguest understanding of how Thor traveled to and from Asgard - they'd had a big interstellar bridge that was now broken, and Thor's dad was able to send people and fetch people back by some other means, but it was hard. And Steve didn't know yet whether Thor... whether Thor was even going to be around.

"In that case," Loki said, his voice coming from a little higher up. "Perhaps it is time that we go."

Steve forced his eyes open to see Loki standing over him, holding out one skinny hand as if to help Steve up. As though a kid - even an Asgardian - would be able to pull Steve's six-hundred-pound dead weight off the floor. Steve chuckled at the thought, which turned into a groan halfway through, and forced himself to roll to his feet.

Once in the air, he staggered a few steps before he found his balance. He'd never in his life felt so tired, so near to crushed. The poison that had burned in his veins for hours was gone - its corrosive fire extinguished - but in its place seemed to be a residue of lead powder coating every nerve, weighing every muscle.

"Go where?" he asked, squinting into the dimness around them. There was nothing but fog in every direction. A little belatedly, he thought to ask, "_Can_ we go? I mean, will... will the town just let us go?"

"Yes?" Loki didn't sound very certain, and the look on his face was troubled. "I think... I think that you have defeated it, Captain. Its host in this world is no more, and it cannot exist on this plane without such an anchor. At least," he added, his voice losing some of the precise diction, "that's what _he_ thought would happen. If you. Managed to kill him."

"Well..." Steve looked around, completely at a loss. He'd learned some woodcraft in Boy Scouts, and more in his time raiding Nazi bases in Europe with the Howling Commandoes, but he was completely out of his depth in this featureless sea of swirling mist and falling ash.

"It doesn't really matter which way we go, does it?" Loki said more quietly. "As long as we go."

He held up his hand, and after a moment Steve reached out and took it.

They went downhill, their footsteps muffled and deadened by the layer of ash that coated the ground. Steve had a vague recollection that if you went downhill long enough you'd find water, a stream or a lake, and if you followed the watercourse long enough you'd find civilization. Mostly, he just didn't have any better ideas.

The fog still clung thickly about them, obscuring things even a few feet away in a dim gray shroud. Yet the light slowly grew stronger as they walked, the grey dome of the unseen sky brightening above. Steve's footsteps began to crunch as he walked; dried leaves and twigs snapped under his feet through the thinning layer of ash.

At last they found a road. It was a narrow, poorly paved gravel road, but it was undoubtedly a road, and so they turned to follow along it. The misty skeletons of leafless trees appeared in the mist on either side of them.

All at once the gravel road turned and T-ended into a much bigger road, a proper highway, with a faded yellow line dividing black asphalt and banked shoulders. On the verge beside the road, a little ways beyond the intersection, sat a short wide billboard. The lights trained on its surface were turned off now, but even through the fog it was easy enough to read:

**YOU ARE NOW LEAVING MIDDLETON, PA  
><strong>_THANKS FOR VISITING!_

Steve stared at it, not quite daring to believe his eyes.

A _bleep_ noise sounded from the vicinity of Steve's wrist. Surprised, he looked down to see his watch flashing an alarm at him. According to the watch, it was 6:00 AM, time for his morning run. That couldn't be right. He _knew_ it couldn't be right. But the fact that the watch was working at all meant...

His hand dove into another of his sealed pockets rifling frantically for the little electronic screamer that Tony had given him to carry. It was small, black and oblong, about the size of his thumb, and it had miraculously survived intact through all of the nightmares of the past 24-hour. It was lit up, showing green.

That meant... that meant that he was out of the field of influence, then; whatever had been interfering with the electronics ever since they crossed the border of the town, had stopped. But Steve remembered seeing the maps of the interference field's diameter, before they'd started on this mission; even if it hadn't grown at all since that time, it should have extended out well beyond his current position.

Unless it was gone because it was _gone._ Because the thing that had been generating it was gone.

Fingers trembling slightly, Steve pressed the broadcast button on the side of the screamer. That would act as a beacon, transmitting his location to anyone nearby who was receiving on this bandwidth - local police, SHIELD troops (if any were in the vicinity,) and all of his teammates.

His teammates. Where were they now? Stumbling around in the woods somewhere in the fog? Still back in the town? Somewhere under the earth, in an unreal place that had ceased to exist in their dimension an hour ago...?

"He said they were dead," Steve blurted out, unable to hold his doubts in any longer. "The... your older self. He said the other Avengers were dead. Is it true?"

Loki chewed on his lip for a moment, his eyes unfocused. Steve didn't know what lost memories or extra-sensory perception he was consulting, but it sent chills up his spine. At last, Loki gave a half-shrug. "I don't know," he said. "_He_ didn't know, either. He couldn't see them. He just said what he did to rile you up and make you fight harder."

Steve exhaled. It wasn't much, as reassurances went. But it was better than nothing. "So they could still be alive, then?" he asked. "They could get out and come find us?"

Loki looked down at the ground. "That depends," he said.

"What does it depend on?" Steve asked.

Another one of those little shrugs. "On what _they_ choose."

There was nothing Steve could think to say to that, and so the two of them - the soldier and the child - settled in to wait, the clear beeping of the alarm beacon the only sound in the world.

* * *

><p>~the end.<p> 


	10. epilogue - alternate ends

**BAD ENDS**

One popular feature of modern video games are Bad Ends, endings alternate to the main storyline that you get if you fail to complete some of the objectives or die during certain battles. Some Bad Ends are also influenced by the player character's choices: if they do or do not do certain things at pivotal moments, that affects what kind of ending they get. Here are a couple of Bad Ends that the Avengers could have gotten at the end of the Labyrinth, if they had made other choices.

PLEASE NOTE: these are not the 'Official' endings for the other Avengers aside from Steve. They are only POSSIBLE endings.

* * *

><p><strong>-BAD END #1: THOR<strong>

The heart-hill was as large as a great hall, but squat and ugly as a troll's den; lumpy and asymmetrical, with grey walls that had an oddly shiny look to them that did not invite touch. The walls throbbed and contracted with each beat, trembling and glistening with unnatural vitality. Thor walked around the edifice, seeking a way inside.

He came around a corner to the end of the structure and there, set into the wall of the monstrous heart, was a door. A plain metal door with steel hinges and a lever-style handle, with no window, sign or lettering of any type to indicate where it might have come from. It looked bizarrely out of place, perfectly square and plain-faced metal door set into the side of the quivering monstrosity.

Thor stepped forward and tried the handle, but it refused to budge: locked. He tried to force it, putting all his strength into breaking the bolt of the lock, but there was not even a hint of give. He unslung Mjolnir from his belt and slammed it against the lock, then against the door itself, but didn't even manage to chip the paint.

Incredulous, Thor swung again and again, increasing the force of the blow until he was putting all his power into each swing. This could not be! Nothing on Midgard should have been able to stand against Mjolnir like this; there was very little even in his father's realm that could withstand the might of the star-hammer. Yet there was not even a dent in the door or its frame.

Then the screaming began.

Even muffled by the walls between them, even distorted as it was by agony and distance, Thor knew that voice - there was no way he could not have known it. "Loki!" he bellowed, slamming once more against the door. His _brother_ was inside there, somewhere, screaming with the hoarse note of pure agony - and Thor could not reach him. "Loki, where are you? I am here! Let me in!"

The screaming did not abate. He went almost berserk then, driven by the sound of his brother's pain: smashing Mjolnir against the lock, the door, the wall, even the ground beneath it in a frantic search for some entry. He dropped the hammer and threw himself bodily against the door, slamming his shoulder against it until it ached, punching the metal with his fists until his knuckles cracked. He even scratched at the hinges, the seams around the door, until his fingers painted lines of blood against the gunmetal gray, all to no avail.

A sudden memory pierced the haze of bloodlust, an image bursting on him with almost calm clarity: the empty locker, in the basement of the factory far above, containing nothing but a single glinting key. The key which Thor had ignored and passed over, confident in his belief that there was no door which could stand against Mjolnir.

And now he sat here at the bottom of the world, clawing at the door that he could not unlock, while on the other side of the door his brother screamed in unending torment. Despair overtook him, and Thor sagged to his knees, fingers dragging red streaks down the door. "Loki..."

* * *

><p><strong>-BAD END #2: CLINT<strong>

Clint walked around the last corner and stepped into the room, bow held at the ready. He was nearing the center of this thing - he knew it. He only had one arrow left, and he meant to make this one count.

It was a big room, almost a cavern, with the ceiling well above his head and empty echoing space all around. From the ceiling hung more of those trailing growths, descending from the ceiling like a stalactite, a tangled mess of smooth tubes and pitted surfaces. Half-buried within the surface of the thing - clutched like a jellyfish entangled its prey - was a tumbled mass of human bones and slime. One staring eye socket winked at him emptily; the other was pierced through by a tentacle that had grown into the aperture, holding the skull firmly in place.

And then a voice spoke.

"Ah, Hawk." The voice was dry as two old bones rubbing together. "So you made it all this way. I did wonder if it would be you - or my brother, of course."

A cold chill shot down Clint's spine, the voice going right to some deep-wired part of his brain. _Enemy,_ whispered one instinct, warring with the other, traitorous one that whispered: _master._

The body hung head-down, the last few scraps of black straggling hair dangling into the air, and the legs and lower half of the body disappeared into the tangled growth attached to the ceiling. The skin was chalk-white and waxy, the flesh withered down to the very bones, but he still knew that face, knew it as well as he knew the voice that spoke again. "The others may underestimate you," the voice continued. "After all, you are only a mere mortal, with no special powers or equipment to aid you. But you and I, we know better, hmmm?"

"Loki," Clint's voice grated, and he raised his bow. "I should have known it would be you. Anything this ruined, this corrupted, the fucking world going crazy around us - I should have known you'd be pulling the strings."

Loki laughed, a sound coarse and broken. "Is that what you think, my Hawk?" he said mockingly. "I suppose that would be the conclusion you would jump to - that if I am involved anywhere, I _must_ be the mastermind,t he one in charge? Look at me! Do I look like I am in _control?"_

Clint gritted his teeth. "It looks to me like you're finally getting what's coming to you," he said savagely. "Guess you pissed off the wrong person this time, huh?"

Loki turned his head to face Clint square-on, and Clint's stomach turned at the glinting, dead eye sockets. "Are you satisfied at last, my Hawk?" he said softly. "Is this the fate that you would have wished on me?"

"No," Clint said, and was surprised to find that it was true. "I always envisioned something - cleaner."

"Well, then." Loki bared his teeth in a death's-head smile. "Here I am, without defenses. Go ahead - take your shot."

A twinge of unease shot through Clint, but he shrugged it off. Finally he had the chance to do what he'd been longing to for two damn years - put an arrow through Loki's eyesockets. Maybe now he'd finally sleep at night, without being tormented by the nightmares of horror - and longing. Maybe now, the traitorous whispers would be silenced.

He raised his bow, pulled back the last arrow on the string. "It's funny," he mused aloud as his aim steadied. "All the times I dreamt of doing this, I never thought it would be a mercy."

He released the shot. It flew straight and true, piercing Loki's eye through the shining black film and bursting out through the back of his skull. His body jerked and rocked in the cage, then hung limply. Blood spurted, then ran down the shaft to drip on the floor.

And then, horribly, the lips curved one more time. "Oh, yes," Loki's dead voice said. "A mercy - for _me."_

_What?_ Clint thought, but there was no time for second thoughts.

Loki's body - melted, dissolving into a cloud of black dust that poured onto the ground. The chamber around them began to rumble and shake, and Clint took a nervous step backwards.

So that was it, right? He'd destroyed the focal point, the centerpiece of this whole damn town. Maybe now he could get out of here, and -

Something tugged at his ankle. Clint stumbled another step, trying to step over it, and found his feet suddenly yanked out from underneath him. He yelled, trying to twist free as the chamber spun around him, and grabbed fruitlessly for any hold. He caught fragmented glimpses of whatever had grabbed him - dark, glistening tentacles wrapped around his ankles.

Then the tendrils pulled him up, up into the ceiling where another cage was waiting. The yelling stopped, and the screaming began.

* * *

><p><strong>-BAD END #3: NATASHA<strong>

"The boy _is_ me, and I am he; the me of my childhood, of my past."

"That's not possible," Natasha said, although her mind was already working furiously over the possibilities. The boy looked back at her, shocked and frightened, and now that she knew what to look for she could see the ghost of Loki-that-would-become in his face.

Loki made an abortive move of his head that would have been an exaggerated eyeroll, had he still had eyes to do it with. "Really, of all the things you've lived through to get this far, and _this_ is where you draw the line of 'possible' or 'impossible?' " he drawled contemptuously. "In this place the rules of space and time no longer apply, and a living location has no care for animal notions of time and paradox. That boy _is _my younger self, wandering where he ought not.

"And this gives you an unparalleled opportunity for heroism, Black Widow," Loki continued, while Natasha was still trying to work that one out. "Kill the boy.

"You see, this is my true past self standing beside you today, no facsimile or phantasm. Whatever is done now, will be just as if it were done one thousand years in the past. If you remove him from the timestream now, all the evil that he will one day do - that I have ever done - will be undone. There will never be portals in the sky above New York City, never be aliens streaming down to wreak havoc on the innocents there. Can you truly face down the ghost of three thousand dead, and tell yourself that one small sacrifice is not worth it?"

Natasha stood frozen, stunned by the implications. She had killed children before, after all, and for much less cause. But she'd tried - she'd wanted to leave all that behind, to step into the service of SHIELD and become newborn.

And yet if Fury were here, Natasha thought she knew what his orders would be - the man would probably pull the trigger himself, if not without remorse, then without regret. _What if you could do it,_ a voice whispered. _Go back in time and find yourself, there in the Red Room, before it all began, before the first death. If with one bullet you could undo all you'd done, bring back all the people you'd killed - wipe out all the red in your ledger in one small act - would you do it?_

"Yes," she said, raised the barrel of the gun and pulled the trigger.

The chamber they were in shook, the walls trembling and the floor heaving. Natasha barely managed to keep her balance, staring in disbelief as the figure of Loki before her melted into black sand and poured onto the floor. _He was telling the truth,_ she thought, surprised.

The walls were pulling - _shredding_ away, opening into a vast space as they peeled into long raw strips of mottled shining gray. In the shadows all around her Natasha caught glimpses of shadowed, hulking figures - here and there, a glint of the raw light off of weapons, long metal bars and chains clutched in massive fists.

Natasha spun wildly in place, looking for a gap in the ranks of monsters. There was none. She was surrounded. Dead-white, fishlike eyes stared at her from the massed ranks, shuffling slowly forward. And there, in the back, a disturbance in the crowd as something huge, something unfathomably strong, _scraped_ along the ground towards her.

_"Chert poberi," _Natasha whispered.

The Hulk howled. The lights went out.

* * *

><p><strong>-BAD END #4: BRUCE<strong>

"I won't let you have him," Bruce said, keeping his voice calm despite his inner shaking. He held tight to the child's hand, clammy inside his own. "You'll have to go through me, first."

A chuckle came from the monstrosity that was Loki, somehow linked - controlled by? - the malevolent town. "As you wish, then," he said, his voice slick with condescending amusement. "Not too hard a task, perhaps, without your Hulk to defend you."

The tendrils struck. Bruce dodged the first one, towing the kid along with him as he went, and then the second. A gap opened up and Bruce saw a glimpse of a clear spot against the wall, and made for it.

"Look out!" Loki's high-pitched voice yelled, but Bruce didn't have time to turn before something huge and heavy swept in and struck him on the side of the head, sending him flying.

A fierce clanging set up in Bruce's ears, and over the ringing he could barely hear the noise of the room outside: the child Loki screaming, the harsh booming laugh of the adult Loki. His glasses had fallen off his face and landed who-knew-where; he could see no glint of metal or glass within reach of his fingers. Or maybe that was the darkness tunneling in around his vision, the world dwindling to a point right in front of his face.

_Concussion symptoms,_ the doctor part of him noted clinically. _Severe enough to indicate damage to the brain. That's bad. Very bad..._

Small hands tugged at his shoulder insistently. "Get up, get up!" the child's voice cried fretfully, barely cutting through the ringing in his ears. "There are more of them coming!"

He was sure Loki was right. But his body was in no condition to respond to the urgent demands; his shoulder was a cracked mass of pain, and he couldn't even feel his leg below the knee. The light pulsed in his vision, tainted with red, as Bruce managed to force himself over onto his back. That was as far as he could get.

Bruce saw the arc of one of the spiked maces whistling overhead; he saw it clearly despite his tunneled vision because it was coming right for him. He heard Loki screaming for him to move, but his body was too sluggish.

_Guess I was useless after all,_ Bruce had time to think. _Sorry, Tony..._

There was an impact, and then everything went black.

* * *

><p>And now, just to leave you on a slightly less sour note, have a Bonus Crack Ending:<p>

**-UFO ENDING: TONY AND BRUCE**

Tony entered Bruce's lab bearing an offering of jelly donuts, saw what was on the counter, and immediately lost his appetite.

Bruce himself was puttering between a freezer and a micro-filament slicer that Tony had built for him, completely oblivious to Tony's presence. Tony cleared his throat and started to put his box of donuts down on an empty counter, then thought better of it. "So, Bruce," he said.

Bruce looked up at him with a vague smile, glasses nearly slipping down over his nose. "Oh, hello Tony," he said in that mild tone of his, and glanced down at Tony's hand. "Are those donuts? Just give me a minute to wash my hands, and I'll be right with you..."

As he bustled off, Tony glowered at the contents of the lab counter and at Bruce's back alternately. Then he sighed, hitching himself up against one of the tables and swinging one foot freely. "So," he said. "Remember that one time we got sent on a mission to that crazy haunted town in rural Pennsylvania?"

Bruce glanced over his shoulder at Tony, raising one eyebrow. "I'm not likely to forget it, Tony," he called back.

"Well, it would be nice if we could, don't you think?" Tony said. "You know - move on, get past it, put it all behind us, deny it ever happened at all..."

"Yes, I think so too," Bruce said, nodding absently.

Tony scowled more at the lab counter. "Which would be a lot easier to do if you didn't insist on _keeping this thing around all the time!"_

His arm shot out to point accusingly at the large, blood-red spider with the needle leggings perched happily on Bruce's lab counter. It looked up at him, the eight beady eyes unnerving enough even without the rest of its monstrous body, and clacked its metallic mandibles together inquiringly.

Bruce sent him a reproving look. "There's no need to be like that, Tony," he said. "Robbie is very helpful around the lab. He's one of the best assistants I've ever had. He'd be a great asset in your lab too, if you'd ever let him - all he wants to do is help."

Tony shuddered, imagining that _thing_ in his workshop and coming up with a big red flashing NOPE. "If he shows up in my lab I have an industrial-strength can of RAID ready," he threatened. "Also a flamethrower."

Robbie the spider made a gesture that Tony could swear was obscene. He gawked in outrage. "Did that spider just give me the finger?!"

"Well, it's your own fault for being rude to him," Bruce admonished.

"Now he's - is he _mooning me_?"

"No, no," Bruce soothed. "That's just a little dance he does when he's happy, you see?"

Tony shuddered. Twerking spiders, that was all he needed in his tower.

* * *

><p>~the end (for real.)<p> 


End file.
